BAGHDAD — Hassan Lami was herding some sheep to a garbage-strewn city lot to graze when six masked men, using guns with silencers, shot him more than 30 times.
As far as anyone can determine, the just-married 20-year-old was killed that July morning because he was a Shiite Muslim.
One week later, another 20-year-old was gunned down, this time by men who didn't bother to wear masks. In his neighborhood, the only reason anyone can think of that Ahmed Dhirgham was killed is that he was a Sunni whose father had worked for the Iraqi intelligence service under Saddam Hussein.
In the last six weeks in the Ghazaliya neighborhood on Baghdad's western edge, where both young men lived, more than 30 people have been killed in what appear to be purely sectarian attacks. Although other forms of violence, such as suicide bombings, have destabilized Iraq, many fear that the Shiite-Sunni targeted killings that have escalated in Baghdad and beyond are tipping the nation toward civil war.
The attention of the Iraqi elite and the media has been on the effort to draft a constitution, but the failure to stem the wave of sectarian killings could pose a greater threat to the country's stability than the failure to reach a constitutional consensus, said several Iraqi government officials who asked not to be named because they did not want to be seen as pointing fingers at members of another sect.
"The government now is so inefficient at controlling the situation that the security situation has deteriorated, and so the political situation has deteriorated," said a senior government official who took part in the negotiations on the constitution.
"They have to get security under control, otherwise it's not going to matter what we do here," he said, speaking from an office in the heavily fortified Green Zone.
"People don't want a constitution -- they want security," said a former general in the Iraqi army, a Sunni who lives in Ghazaliya, home to Shiites and Sunnis alike. The man, who is known in his neighborhood as Abu Arab, asked that his full name not be used because he was afraid of becoming the target of assassins.
The tit-for-tat killings now stalk many of Baghdad's mixed neighborhoods, where Sunnis and Shiites used to live in peace. Often, the people killed, such as the two young men in Ghazaliya, have no involvement in politics.
