No Escaping Iraq Violence

Clad in camouflage uniforms, the gunmen came peeling through the thick morning heat in police trucks. They stopped at a downtown strip of travel companies where Iraqis gather each morning to board buses bound for the safer lands of Syria and Jordan.

The gunmen leaped to the ground, witnesses said, and they worked fast. They seized more than 50 bystanders, pulling men away from their families and hauling drivers from behind the wheels of the buses. They handcuffed the men, blindfolded them and stuffed them into the backs of the trucks like human loot. They covered some of their captives with sheets.

And then they were gone, slamming doors and speeding off into the brilliant morning sunlight. It was only 9 o’clock in a city where security has come unraveled, just another mundane scene that splintered suddenly into violence.

“Those are criminals going after the ransom,” said Saad Tawil, a 42-year-old manager of one of the travel companies clustered on the street in downtown Baghdad. “They will see who is important or rich, and who is not, after interrogating them.”

But other mass kidnappings that have struck the capital this year remain unsolved. In some cases, the victims have never turned up, living or dead.

The mass kidnapping came one day after Prime Minister Nouri Maliki was forced to concede that Iraq’s warring factions were too mutually distrustful to agree on who should run the security services. Having suspended indefinitely a parliament vote on those key ministries, Maliki has left the army and police leadership dangling in a vacuum at a time when bloodshed in Baghdad, and across Iraq, has spiraled upward.

In Baghdad, leaving home to work, shop or visit family has become an increasingly dangerous proposition. Violence rears up without warning; residents navigate a citywide obstacle course of roadside bombs, shootouts and security checkpoints.

The city just had its deadliest month since U.S.-led forces invaded the country in 2003, new Iraqi government documents indicate. More people were shot, stabbed or otherwise violently killed in May than in any other month since the invasion, according to Health Ministry statistics. The figure does not include slain soldiers or civilians killed in bombings, on whom autopsies are not usually performed.

Last month alone, 1,398 bodies were brought to Baghdad’s central morgue, the ministry said. All over the city and out into the provinces, corpses surface on a daily basis in garbage dumps, in abandoned cars or along roadsides. They often bear marks of bondage and torture.

The attacks are frequently characterized by their brazen nature. Gunmen climbed onto a Baghdad bus Monday and killed at least two Shiite students, an Interior Ministry source said.

Over the weekend, masked gunmen set up a roadblock north of Baghdad, stopped a passing bus and ordered the men to disembark. Dividing the Sunnis from the Shiites, they told the Shiites they were “traitors” who would be killed on religious principle, a witness told the Associated Press.

The assailants shot their victims execution-style. When they were done, 24 passengers were dead. Most of them were teenage university students and elderly men.

Although much of Iraq’s bloodshed is carried out for sectarian reasons, there are plenty of criminals simply angling for cash in a lawless land. Kidnapping fellow Iraqis has bloomed into a popular moneymaking scheme.

Monday’s mass kidnapping took place in a bustling, shabby commercial district in downtown Baghdad. The site is relatively fortified: It stands just a stone’s throw from the Justice Ministry, amid a network of Iraqi police checkpoints.

The gunmen’s vehicles roared to a stop on a road lined with the offices of travel agencies and bus line operators. Salihiya is a neighborhood of transit and escape, the last stop many Iraqis make in their flight from a war-ravaged homeland.

The buses leave Baghdad in the morning -- the crushing heat of day is deemed preferable to the perils of riding through the desert at night. The roads to the border run through Sunni-dominated Al Anbar province. Buses are periodically stopped and looted, their passengers killed. For many Iraqis, boarding the bus is yet another gamble -- they’ve grown used to weighing out a certain amount of risk in their daily lives.

Some of the Iraqis who bought tickets Monday didn’t get out soon enough. Along with passengers -- who presumably carried money and could afford to leave the country -- office workers from the transit companies and bus drivers, some of them Syrian, were also grabbed by the assailants.

At least one boy who eked out tips for toting suitcases was snatched up and carted off, witnesses said.

Transit worker Hamza Mohammed, 34, said he took off running when the gunmen arrived. They fired at him but missed, he said.

“They shouted at me and they tried to take me,” he said between puffs of cigarette smoke and telephone calls from Iraqis eager to book a seat on a future bus. “But I fled.”

Witnesses said the kidnappers were outfitted in the uniforms and vehicles used by some of the special forces of the Iraqi police, overseen by the long-troubled Interior Ministry. Police units under the ministry have been accused of working as Shiite death squads on a campaign to eliminate Sunni Arab men. Police have also been accused of kidnapping civilians for ransom.

On Monday afternoon, a special forces commander issued a statement denouncing the kidnapping and insisting his men were innocent. But in a city where the highway patrol is accused of forming death squads and paramilitary fighters are believed to have infiltrated state security organs, witnesses were not convinced.

“I accuse the police,” said a travel office owner who would give only his last name, Ghanem. “The cars were definitely police cars.”