Baghdad: Some killings get noticed, some don't

BAGHDAD, Apr28: When gunmen killed a sister of an Iraqi vice president, it grabbed world headlines.

A few streets away, however, another slaying, typical of hundreds in Baghdad in recent weeks, went all but unnoticed.

Indeed it might never have been recorded had 73-year-old Khatab al-Ani not been shot outside the home of a journalist.

Meysoun al-Hashemi, sister of newly appointed Sunni Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, was killed as she was being driven through the Hay al-Ilaam district of southwestern Baghdad.

As in most such cases, it was unclear who shot her just as in the killing of Ani, whose relatives were carrying his coffin through Hay al-Ilaam at the same time that morning.

He had been on his twice-daily walk to the nearby Sunni mosque with his son on Wednesday evening when gunmen pulled up and opened fire from a BMW car, yet another drive-by shooting.

Neighbours were in their homes when they heard the crackle of gunfire. It is a common sound in Hay al-Ilaam and few took much immediate notice. But news of the slaying soon shook his immediate neighbours, as death came closer to home.

Ani had taken two bullets to the chest and one in the arm.

His son fell to the ground and escaped death.

''I was inside my house when the shooting started,'' a neighbour said, who declined to be named in fear of reprisal.

Nobody knows why he was killed but in a country dangerously close to sectarian civil war, neighbours immediately suspected he was targeted for his religion.

One of the neighbours who helped transport Ani to hospital said he went back to a checkpoint about 50 metres from the site of the killing and asked policemen why they did not take action.

One policeman insisted that he had indeed fired on the car.

But such explanations rarely comfort Iraqis, whose mutual suspicions have deepened since the February bombing of a Shi'ite shrine nearly sparked a full-scale communal conflict.

Many Sunnis mistrust the Shi'ite-dominated police force.

Residents of the area have become more cautious. Some have laid down tree trunks to make it more difficult for gunmen to speed through the area.

Local people rarely venture outside their homes at night.

But Ani insisted on going to the mosque twice a day to pray.

A treasured routine, it cost him his life.

He joined hundreds of other people, most of whom remain anonymous to the wider world, who have died in a cycle of violence over recent weeks in which everyone has become a target and yet which few can understand.

Reuters