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.
Iraqi government statistics show that targeted killings have almost doubled over the last 12 months despite increases in the numbers of policemen on the streets and Iraqi national guard patrols. In July, nearly 700 of the 1,100 bodies brought to Baghdad's central morgue had fatal gunshot wounds. There are no figures for those that fail to make it to the morgue.
"The number of gunshot cases we see now is huge," said professor Abed Razaq Ibaidi, acting director of the Central Institute of Forensic Medicine in Baghdad, the largest morgue in the country.
Doctors believe that most gunshot victims are the targets of assassination-style attacks because they have multiple bullet wounds, many of them around the chest. "Most of the time they use machine guns, and it [seems] intentional because ... they shoot more than once around the chest area," Ibaidi said.
Sometimes the slayings verge on the realm of massacre. In April, dozens of bodies, many believed to be Shiite villagers, were found in the Tigris River south of Baghdad. In May, 14 corpses, said to be those of members of a Sunni Arab clan, were discovered in a ditch in Baghdad. In July, the bodies of 12 Shiites were found in an empty lot in a Sunni enclave near Baghdad's southern edge.
The dead are left by the side of the road, in empty lots, slumped in cars or minibuses pocked with bullet marks. There are so many that the Central Institute has nearly tripled its pathology staff from nine doctors to 25, and they work almost round the clock.
Families in the ethnic minority in neighborhoods such as Ghazaliya are selling their homes and moving to places where they are in the majority. Without more than anecdotal evidence, it's unclear whether this could become an exodus. Hassan Lami's family is among those planning to leave: It has put its house up for sale.
Once people start to leave, the tide of instability can be hard to reverse, said Ed Joseph, a fellow at the Wilson Institute who worked in Bosnia-Herzegovina during that Balkan country's war in the mid-1990s.
He said the likelihood of civil war increases if, after attacks targeting a community, other members of the minority population flee, as Muslims in Bosnia did after villages were attacked by ethnic Serb soldiers.
"Once people leave en masse, they must find a place to go," he said. "They go toward places that are safe ... where 'their kind' is in charge. Then, in turn, hostility there turns toward the minorities in the areas they have fled to.
