Shootings shake neighborhood’s fragile peace

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Shootings shake neighborhood’s fragile peace
By James Warden, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Tuesday, April 1, 2008

The lone black mark on Saydiyah’s peace is two separate shootings in which two people died and one was wounded.

Saturday night, residents in this Baghdad neighborhood found two men who they say appeared to have been killed execution-style with a silenced weapon — although the Americans haven’t confirmed that. The next day, another man was shot in the shoulder.

“Peace” is relative in Iraq. The two incidents pale in comparison to neighboring areas where last week twice as many Americans died in a single roadside bomb attack and four times as many insurgents died during one firefight.

Yet the killings reflect dormant tensions still present after months of peace in Saydiyah. At one point after Saturday’s incident, an American commander in the area snapped at a local leader who jumped to sectarian conclusions before he knew the facts.

Those facts — even the most basic ones — can be incredibly hard to come by. Consider Sunday’s shooting. An American interpreter got a call that another person had been shot and killed execution-style. The soldiers rushed to the area only to be told that the victim was actually shot in the shoulder and wounded.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=53735