BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 13 — Shiite vigilantes seized four men suspected of terrorist attacks, interrogated them, beat them, executed them and left their bodies hanging from lampposts in a Shiite slum today, according to witnesses and government officials. The graphic display of street justice was the first response to a coordinated attack on Sunday evening that killed more than 50 civilians in a Shiite market, and it seemed to only add to the seeping sense of lawlessness.
In Sadr City, the Shiite slum that is essentially a city within a city, government forces have vanished. The streets are ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns. They poke their heads into cars and detain whom they want. Mosques blare for American troops to stay out. Increasingly, the Americans have been doing just that.
There seems to be no minimum age to join the action. A playful boy named Mustapha, who said he was 11 but looked about 8, was part of a 4-foot-tall militia of Sadr City boys struggling to drag chunks of concrete into the street to block cars. "We're guarding the road," Mustapha explained. He was carrying a toy pistol. Some of the other boys had real ones.
Across town in a busy shopping area in western Baghdad, a 15-minute gunfight broke out between security contractors, more evidence of the authority vacuum. According to an Iraqi interior ministry spokesman who declined to give his name, armed guards for a cellphone company killed two guards for an Iraqi politician after a roadside "misunderstanding."...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/international/middleeast/13cnd-iraq.html
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