The killings are taking on a new pattern

Iraq War Changing With Attacks on Companies

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The Associated Press

Wednesday 29 March 2006

Baghdad - Fourteen shot at a trading company. At least 90 kidnapped at other businesses. Bodies dumped nightly, bound hand and foot, some tortured. A new brand of violence - a deadly mix of organized crime and sectarian murder - is tearing at Iraq.

Its origins are murky. But the savagery has turned March into a pivotal month in the three-year war - a month of gruesome news, mixed with some good. A sharp decline in American deaths appears to be the payoff for handing more duties to the Iraqi army, leaving U.S. forces less exposed to attack.

At the same time, there has been the rise in the slayings of civilian Iraqis, the reasons for which are hard to find.

Not so many weeks ago, this was a conflict with straightforward, if brutal, terms. Sunni insurgents and al-Qaida terrorists used car bombs, roadside bombs, suicide bomb belts and sniper rifles to target U.S. troops, Iraqi soldiers, police and civilians - mainly Shiites, the newly ascendent majority after years of Saddam Hussein's oppression.

Those groups still operate and still kill. But their war has been dwarfed by the shadowy and incipient terror stalking the capital of Baghdad and its adjoining provinces.

Or perhaps - as some Iraq officials believe - the insurgents simply switched their targets, moving from American and Iraqi troops to targeting businesses and Iraqi civilians as a way to cause chaos or to fund their terror work.

Either way, the staggering shift makes it difficult to predict how the U.S. military will or can react to the new climate of violence, and what it might mean for hopes to begin a troop pullout this summer.

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