In A Baghdad Killing, Questions That Haunt Iraq

BAGHDAD, July 13 — At 8:45 a.m. on Friday, Khalid W. Hassan was navigating his car out of one of Baghdads most dangerous neighborhoods on his way to work as a reporter and interpreter at The New York Times bureau here. My area is blocked, he wrote in a cellphone text message to the papers newsroom manager. I am trying to find a way out.

Khalid Hassan, who worked for The New York Times, was killed in Baghdad today.

Within 45 minutes, about two miles from his home, Mr. Hassan, whose Palestinian family migrated to Iraq in 1948, was forced to the side of the road by gunmen in a black Mercedes. The gunmen opened fire with automatic rifles, pitting Mr. Hassans rundown Kia car with bullets. At least one struck him in the upper body, but failed to kill him.

Mr. Hassan, a heavyset, pranksterish 23-year-old, loved the new world of cellphones, online computers and downloadable videos ushered in by the American occupation of Iraq, so much so that he spent a quarter of his monthly salary recently on another new phone. Slumped in his seat, he called his mother, then his father, at work as a school caretaker, telling them he had been shot. Im O.K., Mom, he said.

An off-duty policeman in a gasoline station line told Mr. Hassans father what came next. A second car with gunmen, an Opel Vectra, seeing Mr. Hassan on his cellphone, pulled forward and fired two fatal shots into Mr. Hassans head and neck.

The murderous turmoil in Baghdad has reached a point where many families never know the killers of their loved ones, or their motives. Sunni insurgents? Shiite militias? Killers who mimic one or the other, while pursuing more private motives of greed, spite or revenge? Or, in Mr. Hassans case, the nature of his employment, which placed him doubly at risk: as an Iraqi journalist, and as an Iraqi working for Americans?

With a police force that barely functions because of the bludgeoning it has taken from Sunni insurgents — and that has spawned Shiite death squads — families can rarely hope to see killers tracked down. Now, that may be the fate of Mr. Hassans family, for whom he was the principal breadwinner. After his parents separated during his teenage years, Mr. Hassan supported his mother and four sisters, all under 18, by selling cosmetics door to door and, for the last four years, using a polished colloquial English learned through movies, for The New York Times.

Among colleagues who reminisced about him on Friday, Mr. Hassan was remembered for a willingness to venture into some of Iraqs riskiest war zones, his occasionally imprudent enthusiasm, and a quirky humor. He suggested his colleagues call him Solid Khalid, making light of his size.

Mr. Hassan was the second member of The Timess Iraqi news staff — a group that includes more than 30 journalists in Baghdad and across the country — to be shot and killed. A journalist the newspaper relied on in Basra, Fakher Haider, was taken from his home and killed in the fall of 2005, a murder for which some local officials blamed Shiite militiamen angered by aspects of his work. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, 110 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the American-led invasion in March 2003. The toll includes 88 Iraqis, including Mr. Hassan.

By sunset on Friday, Mr. Hassan was buried alongside hundreds of other victims of Iraqs recent violence in a makeshift cemetery in the Adhamiya district, miles from his home, that was a childrens soccer field until last year. Adhamiya is a stronghold of Iraqs Sunni minority, which was ousted from power with Saddam Husseins overthrow, and people emerging from evening prayers at a nearby mosque joined the mourning for Mr. Hassan, a Sunni, by shouting slogans against what they called the Shiite infidels who have taken power now, and the American occupiers who made that possible.

Some friends and relatives of Mr. Hassan believe he probably was a victim of the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia founded by the populist cleric Moktada al-Sadr. For weeks the Mahdi Army has been locked in a lethal struggle with Sunni extremists for control of Saidiya, Mr. Hassans neighborhood in southern Baghdad. The struggle is part of a wider, neighborhood-by-neighborhood contest between Shiite militiamen and Sunni extremists, some linked to the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

Together, the two groups have turned Saidiya into one of the citys most violent war zones. Residents of the neighborhood said Friday that Sunni extremists, many of them teenagers, had moved into vacant apartments in the area, vowing to protect the dwindling Sunni population there. Shiite militiamen, the residents said, have taken up sniper positions, and are entering the neighborhood in police uniforms, then changing into civilian clothes to carry out killings.

It was in the hope of quelling sectarian warfare of this kind, especially in Baghdad, that President Bush ordered nearly 30,000 more troops deployed in Iraq earlier this year. But for the people of Saidiya, the result, five months later, has often been the opposite. With the main American push in neighborhoods farther west, extremists have shifted their focus, preferring to battle it out in areas American reinforcements have not yet reached.

For Mr. Hassan and his family, life became a lottery. Earlier this year, they changed apartments in Saidiya when their previous home was wrecked by a truck bombing that the police said was the work of Sunni extremists. Last month, one of Mr. Hassans uncles was killed in a drive-by shooting in the nearby neighborhood of Topchi; the family blamed Shiite extremists. Earlier this week, a colleague of Mr. Hassans in The Timess Baghdad newsroom fled Saidiya after 10 of the 12 families in his building, including Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Christians, moved to neighborhoods elsewhere. The only people left in the building now are a disabled man and his daughter.

Mr. Hassan told colleagues he feared for the lives of himself and his family, but rejected suggestions that he should move. Where should we go? he said. Is there anywhere we would be safe?

Ali Adeeb, Ahmad Fadam, Stephen Farrell, Wisam A. Habeeb and Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting.

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