A dangerous war makes a staggering shift

Also since the start of March, gunmen — mostly masked, many wearing police uniforms — have stormed at least six Baghdad businesses. On Wednesday, eight people were killed at the al-Ibtikar trading company when they were lined up against a wall and shot, and six others were wounded. At least 90 workers have been kidnapped and tens of thousands of dollars stolen in the five other assaults.

More killings execution-style
Execution-style killings and kidnappings of civilians happened before late February, of course — but not nearly in such big numbers.

In one rough accounting of the rise, for example, the AP reported 36 bodies found in Iraq in December, 150 in January and 195 in February. To date in March, the AP has reported 374 bodies found.

It is not always easy in war zones to separate criminal thugs from political thugs, and Iraq’s insurgency has always been made up of several disparate groups.

“These are concentrated efforts to paralyze the country. They are either from al-Qaida or from the remnants of Saddam’s regime. They want to tell the people that there is no government,” Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman said after Wednesday’s attack.

“All these operations have one aim: to freeze life in Iraq and sabotage the democratic process. They want to take us back to the dictatorship,” said Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Khafaji, a deputy interior minister. He, too, blamed al-Qaida and said “we will work day and night to arrest them.”

The violence that has hit Iraqi businesses may be aimed at old-line Sunni business moguls. It could be the work of either common criminal gangs, or of death squads operating in or tolerated by the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry, which controls the police.

Organized-crime role?
Organized crime may now account for a majority of the violence in the country, said Matthew Sherman, who just finished a two-year stint advising the Interior Ministry.

That, he notes, in a recent interview with an online publication of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, “really falls outside of what traditional military counterinsurgency operations cover.”

Across this critical month, meanwhile, Iraqi politicians struggled but failed to form a government that might — U.S. officials hope — help put a lid on skyrocketing sectarian violence. The successful creation of a unified central authority remains key to the hoped-for start of an American troop withdrawal this summer.

Yet compromise has proved impossible so far.

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