Killed for the sake of a name
By Aqeel Hussein in Baghdad and Colin Freeman
(Filed: 02/04/2006)

For police in Baghdad's Al Adil neighbourhood, the 14 corpses looked like the products of just another night's work in Iraq's sectarian war. All were young Sunni men, all had been killed with a bullet to the head and all were found dumped at a tip.

Only when they noticed their identity cards - carefully placed on the victims' chests - did officers realise what else they had in common. All shared the same first name: Omar.


Men lift the coffin of a slain relative outside Yarmouk Hospital
The victims' only crime, it seemed, was to be namesakes of Imam Omar, a prominent historical figure in the Sunni religious tradition. Until recently, it would have been no more a statement of faith than a Christian being called John, Peter or Paul.

But in Iraq's increasingly polarised religious climate, their name alone seems to have been enough to earn them a death sentence - either from Shia extremists bent on avenging sectarian murders by Sunnis, or from foreign terrorists intent on fomenting civil unrest.

Whoever the culprits, the murders marked another appalling low in the random, tit-for-tat violence that threatens to edge the country into a full-scale civil war.

The discovery of the bodies last Sunday came as the Iraqi government disclosed that more than 30,000 people had fled their homes to escape Sunni-Shia violence after February's bombing of the Golden Shrine, a Shia holy site in the city of Samarra.

Morgue officials estimate that up to 1,500 have been killed since then, prompting an exodus of people from mixed Sunni-Shia areas. The violence continued yesterday as gunmen killed six Shias travelling in a minibus north of Baghdad.

The men found on the rubbish dump fitted the pattern exactly - they were all Sunni residents of two predominantly Shia neighbourhoods in the capital, Al Shaab and New Baghdad, said Capt Hussam al Bayaati, of Al Adil police station.



"We think they were kidnapped from these two neighbourhoods and then killed," he said. "When we discovered them on the rubbish dump they all had their IDs placed on their chests.

"They seem to have been targeted because they were called Omar. Some of them had already received messages delivered to their homes telling them to change their names."

The fact that the men were driven across town to be dumped in Al Adil seems to have been no coincidence: the neighbourhood is known across Baghdad as one of the staunchest strongholds of the Sunni insurgency.

It was from here that the American reporter, Jill Carroll, was abducted three months ago before being freed last week, and here that a passing coachload of 20 Shia pilgrims was massacred last month.

Capt al Bayaati said the rubbish tip was close to where the coach was attacked, suggesting that whoever put the bodies there wanted to deliver a warning. "It looks like some kind of revenge attack, although I am not saying that the Shia people did it."

The theory that the killings were the work of Shia hitmen is bolstered by the fact that Imam Omar has long been seen as an enemy of the Shia faith.

He is said to have quarrelled with the Shia idol, Imam Ali, over who should assume the leadership of the Muslim community, a row that led to his being blamed for the death of Ali's wife, Fatima, about 1,500 years ago.

The bodies were taken to Baghdad's Al Yarmouk Hospital, where they were examined by Dr Yasser Ammar. "They were all killed by the same way - a bullet in the head," he said.

Ahmed al Kafaji, a senior member of the Al Dawa movement, a Shia political party, insisted Shia militias were not to blame. "I think it is just the same terrorists who blew up the shrine at Samarra to make a civil war," he said.

But his denials are dismissed by local Sunni politicians, who say Shia militias are now showing the same indiscriminate bloodthirstiness as the Sunni Salafists, the extremist strain of their own faith.

Salman al Jumaili, a spokesman for the Al Tuwafaq (Agreement) Party, said: "This crime was the work of the new Shia Salafists who want to make a civil war. They put the bodies in the same place where 20 Shias were killed, but that was the work of the terrorists, not the Sunni people. We invite all people to stay calm."

In the meantime, other Omars are living in fear. Omar Sittar, 23, a student at Baghdad University, said: "I will make two IDs: one with the name Ali for visiting Shia areas, and one with Omar for when I am at home."