Religious Hostility Surfacing

The sons of this close-knit Shiite hamlet on a branch of the Euphrates River signed up to join the Iraqi National Guard this fall, eager to serve their country and help their large families make a living.

But before they got a chance to serve, they were tricked by Sunni insurgents dressed as Iraqi police and driven into the desert south of Baghdad, where they were tortured and killed.

Every one of Abbasiyat’s 10 homes lost a son. Two other victims were from just down the road. Last week, a month after the attack, the sounds of women weeping still rose from the courtyards of the brick and mud homes.

“They were very young, just at the threshold of manhood. They did not know what they wanted to do yet,” said Sheik Ali Dohan, a frail man with a lined brown face and slate blue eyes. The sheik, chief of the Dohan clan, lost a son in the attack.

Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni Muslim leaders alike downplay the role of sectarian or ethnic hatred in the country’s bloody insurgency. But the gruesome killings illustrate how incidents that are often portrayed as reprisals against government supporters are sometimes motivated by sectarian animosities and understood by the victims and perpetrators as acts of religious vengeance.

In this respect the slaughter near the town of Latifiya is similar to scores of such incidents that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Iraqis, most of them Shiites but also some Kurds and now some Sunnis as well.

Whether these acts of violence will explode into civil warfare is an ominous question. The answer will probably be determined by people such as the elders of Abbasiyat. So far, religious leaders have stopped them from seeking retribution. But for the sheiks of the Dohan tribe and others like them, the impulse toward revenge may well prevail.

“We asked Sayyid Ali Sistani to give us permission to liberate Latifiya by ourselves and not wait for the government,” said Sheik Dohan, using the honorific accorded to Sistani, the most senior religious leader of the country’s Shiites. “But they would not let us do that.”

No one wants to admit there is the making of a civil war in the bloodshed. If asked, most clergymen -- Sunni and Shiite -- and politicians will deny that the violence is imbued with sectarian or ethnic hatred. They will insist that to the extent there are killings, they are being carried out by non-Muslims or by a few people who in no way represent the population.

“If you look deep into our history, 7,000 years of history, we never, ever had a single incident of unrest built on ethnicity or sect or religion,” said interim President Ghazi Ajil Yawer on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last month. The Sunni leader was apparently overlooking Saddam Hussein’s bloody campaigns against the Kurds and Shiites.

But Western diplomats who have watched sectarian struggles elsewhere in the Arab world say they fear that the fight ultimately will be between a predominantly Sunni insurgency and Iraqi security forces made up mostly of Shiites and ethnic Kurds. The Shiites, after more than 30 years of repression by Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime, probably will find it difficult to restrain themselves.

“The Sunnis will be under the boot of a Kurd and Shiite security force with a leavening of Sunnis,” said a Western diplomat who has spent many years in the region. “In the end, the 20% of the population which is Sunni cannot fight off the other 80%, and the Shias will find it difficult to forget the history -- how the Sunnis treated them when the Sunnis were in power.”

However, this autumn, in the Sunni towns south of Baghdad, it was the Sunnis who had the Iraqi security forces in their sights. A man wearing an Iraqi government uniform was a walking bull’s-eye.

The towns of Latifiya, Mahmoudiya, Yousifiya and Haswa north of here became killing fields. Between early October and mid-December, there were more than 75 reported slayings of Iraqi police and national guardsmen in the region south of Baghdad. More almost certainly went unrecorded as the Arab and Western media hardly dared to venture there.

The case of the Dohan clan, part of the Urayf tribe, reveals much about the way sectarian identity and government support are inextricably interwoven both for attackers and victims.

For this extended family of rice and date farmers living along the riverbank, life has changed little over hundreds of years.

Early this month, Sheik Dohan spoke to a reporter in the unheated and bare reception room of his home, the winter wind blowing through the windows and doors. Recently harvested amber rice was heaped in piles in the clans’ courtyards, waiting to be polished for sale.

The killings in early November lacerated the Dohans’ simple life. Everyone here remembers when they heard the news, the disbelief and then the horror.

It was early afternoon, and the driver who had been transporting most of the men in his minibus stumbled into the compound. Dried blood streaked his face and his limbs were bruised from beatings. He trembled as he spoke, trying to describe what he had seen.

He had not witnessed the killings, but was taken to the site to see the bodies and was given a written message for police, signed by the group that said it was responsible for the killings.

“When he first arrived, we weren’t able to comprehend what he was saying,” said the sister of one of the young men killed. “But then we understood, and our mothers began to weep and beat their breasts and tear their hair.”

A day earlier, Dohan’s 23-year-old son, Rasul, and 11 other men had traveled to Baghdad to join the Iraqi National Guard. After they signed up, the recruits were told to return in four days. They headed back to Abbasiyat, just a few miles from the holy city of Najaf.

Dohan believes they were followed from the recruiting center and the ambushers were tipped off that they were coming. At Latifiya, about 20 miles southwest of the capital, they ran into a traffic jam and men dressed as Iraqi police pulled them over. “They said, ‘You are suspected of carrying explosives and of having a plan to detonate them here,’ ” said Dohan, recounting what the driver told them.

The young men denied it and may have sealed their death warrant when they said, “We are your brothers, we are all in the Iraqi National Guard and we are protecting this country.” Portraits of the Shiites’ revered historic icon, Imam Ali, on their dashboard easily identified them as members of that sect.

Evincing concern for their safety, the phony policemen led the recruits’ minivan off the road. Then gunmen in two Opel sedans forced the guardsmen’s vehicle deep into the desert to a small Shiite mosque near a defunct factory.

“First they beat them and disfigured them and made them curse the Shiite saints,” Dohan said. A week later, when he visited the mosque where his son was killed, Dohan saw graffiti that left little question that the killings were sectarian. “It said ‘Shiite apes, idol worshipers’ and another said ‘No more Shiites after today,’ ” Dohan said.

The recruits were shot, each about a dozen times, and their bodies piled in the small shrine.

Trying to retrieve the bodies became a final nightmare. When relatives approached the site five days after the killings, they found it guarded by three armed men who seemed to be awaiting them, to add to the death toll.

It was the police chief of Hillah, farther south of Latifiya, who, with the help of American soldiers, arrested the three armed guards and retrieved the bodies, avoiding the possibility that the Dohan clan would shoot their way into the mosque.

To the Dohan clan it is clear that members of the Janabi tribe, a Sunni group, based near Latifiya, are responsible for the deaths. Daoud Salman, an unlettered farmer who lost his 20-year-old son, Salman, in the attack, offered a nuanced explanation of the dynamic at work.

“It is a mixture of two reasons: that they are Iraqi National Guard and are defending the country and that they are Shiites,” he said. “When the Sunnis were at the peak of their power they did not hurt us because they were holding the reins. Now, they are no longer holding them and they want to win back power; they hate this government. But a hidden hatred against the Shiites is also driving these people.

“But why, why? Don’t they [the Sunnis] say too, ‘There is no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger,’ ” he asked, reciting the central credo of the Muslim faith, shared by both Sunnis and Shiites.

In the days after the killings, the Dohan family met with representatives of Sistani and also with Abdelaziz Hakim, a cleric and leader of one of the major Shiite political parties. When both leaders forbade them from trying to seek revenge, they went to the governor of Najaf, a secular figure. He turned them down too.

The Shiite clerics, who are based in Najaf, saw the danger in the demand for revenge. They sent representatives to the funerals. They also backed a meeting late last month between the chiefs of the Middle Euphrates Tribes, which dominate south-central Iraq, and Sayyid Mohammed Bahr Uloom, a Shiite cleric and a member of the interim National Assembly.

Hundreds of tribal leaders attended, agreeing that it was essential to stand against any drift toward sectarian war. And they sent a letter to interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that said: “The tribal leaders of the Middle Euphrates region ask the Iraqi government to take a serious stance toward the killings in Latifiya that targeted the Shiites. We can’t keep silent about them, there must be a solution for this big problem, and if there is no solution then the tribes will take action themselves.”

The call to resist sectarian war has come from many Sunnis as well. The Sunni Muslim Scholars Assn., which has more than 1,000 imams at mosques across the country, has made repeated statements in recent weeks condemning attacks on Kurds and other minority sects in northern Iraq, even after several of its members were executed.

But the urge for vengeance in men like the Dohan fathers is hard to gainsay. Sheik Dohan made clear they would not be deterred from what they viewed as their mission: defending the country and vanquishing the insurgents. Twenty of their sons are currently serving in the Iraqi National Guard. One of Dohan’s 11 remaining sons and a cousin have been serving in the Sunni Muslim stronghold of Fallouja with Iraqi forces for more than two months and do not yet know that their kinsmen are dead.

“We still send our sons through Latifiya to Baghdad to serve their country,” Dohan said. “We feel afraid, but what choice do we have? We have to defend our country, and if we gave up sending our sons and others give up sending their sons, the country will not work.” But steps must be taken to stop the killing of Shiites, he said.

“The chieftain of each tribe in Latifiya must be arrested because each tribe’s sheik must be able to control his things in his place.”

Eventually, he said, “because they [the Janabis] started the violence, they must be crushed. The criminals must be beheaded.

“This will deter those who are thinking of doing the same thing,” Dohan said. “It’s the same as with Saddam. He was so brutal to stay in power, and whoever is less than brutal will not succeed.”

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A Times special correspondent in Najaf contributed to this report.