Death squads deepen division in Baghdad

"The humvees just roll right on by now,'' he says. "When we started, the Americans came to us, said they know we're guards, and told us as long as we don't point our weapons at them everything should be OK."

Still, more and more of the city's residents are being pushed into the arms of militias, many of which have either political agendas, are involved in criminal activity, or both.

The owner of an auto-parts store in downtown Baghdad says he is visited once a month by a group of men with pistols tucked under their shirts, demanding $300 in protection money. "They say they're with the insurgency and that they're protecting me from worse things,'' he says. "Who knows the truth ... I just pay. We all pay."

Abu Omar, a barrel-chested Sunni Arab and former policeman, knew who his attackers were at the end of last month. He was living in Baladiyat, a neighborhood in East Baghdad on the edge of Sadr City, which has 2 million residents who are more or less controlled by Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.

Around midnight, seven cars roared down his street. One of the vehicles, a Toyota Landcruiser, burst through his front gate while men with rifles, grenades, and black masks poured into his yard, breaking the windows in his car and at the front of his house with their rifle butts, shouting "where's Omar, where's Omar,'' the name of his 18-year-old son.

Omar scrambled over a back fence and found safety in a neighbor's house, while his father was taken away for five hours of interrogation. "They told me that they were from the Mahdi Army and I thought these were my last moments on earth,'' he says. "But after a while they got a call, and decided to let me go. But they also told me they'd kill my son when they got him."

Abu Omar says the men told them they were killing all young men named Omar and Bakar - popular Sunni names borrowed from early Islamic caliphs hated by Shiites. They said they would be back for his son. After his release he called the police for protection. "They told me that close to Sadr City there's nothing they could do for a Sunni."

The next day, like hundreds of Iraqi families, both Shiite and Sunni Arab, he fled his old neighborhood. In his case, he sought safety in a Sunni area to the west of the Tigris.

Despite promises from Iraq's new Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that Iraq's militias would be reined in, groups like the fighters loyal to Mr. Sadr - who helped Mr. Maliki secure his new post - are becoming more assertive.

When a British helicopter was shot down in the largely Shiite southern city of Basra Saturday, killing the five men aboard, about 300 of Sadr's supporters rallied to attack British forces, who were moving to secure the wreckage and search for survivors, with Molotov cocktails and stones, setting four British armored vehicles alight.

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