In Iraq, assassinations are a nightly event

The intensity of the recent assassinations has attracted lurid coverage in the Arabic-language media, with haunting details of the previous night’s attacks recounted each morning in television and newspaper reports across the country.

Iraqi intelligence officials say the killers include gunmen who have stalked Iraqi bureaucrats with semiautomatic weapons muzzled with silencers. Others have been masked men on motorbikes who slap magnetic “sticky bombs” on motorcades carrying political and military elite.

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(Aaron C. Davis/THE WASHINGTON POST) - BAGHDAD, IRAQ: Members of an Iraqi police explosives unit look for evidence after a bomb was detoated near a military checkpoint , wounding two officers and a child in Baghdad's Jadriya neighborhood.

In response, some police officers said they have refused to drive their state-run pickup trucks, shunning any vehicles with Iraqi government markings as “caskets.” Iraq’s intelligence agencies have acquired scores of beat-up taxis for agents and high-ranking officials so they can disguise themselves on their way to and from work.

To cut off potential escape routes, security forces have erected new roadblocks and checkpoints in recent days, contributing to traffic gridlock.

“It’s a new, blind kind of insurgency,” said Ahmen Riyad, 25, a police officer who was directing traffic this week at an intersection adorned with makeshift memorials to three assassinated police officers, including two killed recently by gunmen using silencers.

In recent congressional testimony, State Department officials have described Iraq as “relatively stable” as the roughly 50,000 U.S. troops still in the country begin to prepare for departure.

A front group for al-Qaeda in Iraq recently asserted responsibility for most of the killings in recent months. In a posting on an extremist Web site, the Islamic State of Iraq listed the names of 62 government employees and security workers it said it had killed, including 22 assassinated with silenced weapons.

In an interview deep inside one of Iraq’s police compounds, Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, the domestic intelligence chief, said the government has information suggesting that remnants of the country’s Baathist regime might have returned to Iraq in recent months from Syria.

But he said Sunni insurgents are not the only force behind the recent killings. Kamal said Shiite extremist groups, most notably Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which has ties to Iran, seem to be behind some of the killings, targeting anyone perceived as against them, he said.

Marisa Cochrane Sullivan, an expert on Shiite extremist groups in Iraq and the deputy director of the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, said she thinks the increase in assassinations has less to do with Iraq’s neighbors attempting to compound turmoil in the Middle East than jockeying for superiority for when U.S. forces leave. “It’s a very uncertain time, and groups are trying to work now to influence in their favor.”

Special correspondent Aziz Alwan contributed to this report.