BAGHDAD, March 27 -- In the insurgents' war of bombs and bullets against Iraqis cooperating with U.S. forces, Lamya Yusef, a contract worker at a U.S. military base, comes armed with a rearview mirror.
Attackers firing automatic weapons killed five of her fellow office workers in Baghdad last week as the women drove home from the fortified Green Zone that houses U.S. and Iraqi government installations. A colleague at the U.S. base where she works in Baghdad was killed just a week earlier, when gunmen shot the woman as she pulled into her parking spot in front of her house, Yusef said. The killing of a man in Yusef's neighborhood two days ago gave neighbors an inkling that he, too, may have been a U.S. military contract worker.
An Iraqi civilian, left, and police officer eye the scene of an explosion March 16 in Baghdad. The blast was heard at the nearby Green Zone, where employees worry about their safety.
(Ali Jasim -- Reuters)
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And Sunday, a video posted on a Web site purportedly by the extremist group al Qaeda in Iraq showed what appeared to be the killing of an Interior Ministry worker. The group, headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi, said in the video that the man was shot because he was a liaison officer with U.S. forces. An Interior Ministry spokesman said, however, that the man had been a desk worker in a ministry operations room in the Green Zone.
Yusef commutes with several other Iraqi co-workers to Camp Victory, a U.S. base near Baghdad's airport on one of the city's most heavily targeted routes. "We just look in the mirror, change our route every two days, change our car every two days and ask our God for help," she said.
The number of attacks targeting the thousands of Iraqis who work at U.S. military installations has stayed steady in recent months, including the sporadic, and much rarer, killings of women. Three women who worked at the office of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi in the Green Zone were followed home and killed earlier this year, said Sabah Kadim, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry.
Iraqis -- chiefly Iraqi security forces -- are taking more of the brunt of attacks as Americans try to build up Iraq's military and police forces.
Many Iraqis working for U.S. forces say they dodge or lie outright in response to questions about their jobs from neighbors, shopkeepers and strangers, but word can still filter out. Sometimes, simply being seen leaving the concertina wire-topped concrete walls of the Green Zone is enough to draw an assailant.
"This is always the most dangerous time -- getting out of it, and coming back," Kadim said. "It's not difficult to find out that someone is working in the Green Zone."
U.S. military spokesmen declined to release details of the killing of the five female contract workers. Kadim said the victims were cleaning women in the Green Zone, the grimy, sprawling headquarters of the U.S. military and the Iraqi government it protects.
Yusef, citing co-workers who knew the women, and some media reports say they were translators, not janitors. The women were driving home together, and the driver had pulled over to drop off the first passenger when gunmen in two cars opened fire on them, according to Yusef and police accounts issued to news agencies.
At Camp Victory, shift changes bring workers out the back gates onto a two-lane road, lined on both sides with cars of relatives waiting to take them home. The only base guard in sight passed in and out of view on a watchtower hundreds of yards away. Men strolled out with their work overalls slung over their shoulders. A few women, such as Yusef, walked out self-consciously in stylish clothes and uncovered hair. At the end of a road without checkpoints, one of the women donned a black abaya, whipped her head back and forth scanning for her ride, then darted through traffic to a waiting car.
The Camp Victory colleague who was killed most recently had avoided the drive home for two years, Yusef said. Accepting Camp Victory's offer to house contract workers on the base, the woman had lived a sterile existence in a trailer on the base and agreed to off-base assignments only if they were outside Baghdad, away from acquaintances. She had quit her job after an unrelated office disagreement two weeks ago. Unknown gunmen shot her dead as soon as she pulled up to her house that day, Yusef said.
Numerous other colleagues quit after receiving death threats. Yusef stayed home for a month when she could not find a driver she trusted. After the killing of the five office workers last week, she and her closest colleagues at Camp Victory asked their U.S. military supervisor if they might work from home. He said no, she recounted.
A relatively good salary that has helped during her husband's long period of unemployment, and a work schedule that allows her to spend time with a disabled son, keeps her coming back to Camp Victory.
"We have no choice," she said. The night they learned that the five base workers had been killed, her husband said, "One of these days, you'll be one of them," she recalled.
Col. Bill Buckner, a U.S. military spokesman at Camp Victory, said Sunday that he had no immediate details of attacks on base workers. The base commander has tried to share information with contractors on possible threats to their employees, Buckner said. In general, the best thing that U.S. troops can do for Iraqi contract employees is to help build a security force that can protect them, he said.
"Once they are outside the gates, they are on their own," Buckner said. "It becomes a sovereign nation, Iraqi security force issue . . . to provide that security for their own people."
The video released Sunday of the purported killing identified the victim in English as a colonel. Tied to a chair between two men clasping automatic weapons, he delivered a flat-voiced statement saying he had seen Iraqi women abused in U.S. custody, an allegation frequently made by Zarqawi's group but denied by U.S. forces. A third man then appeared to shoot him.
Meanwhile Sunday, guards at the Ministry of Science and Technology in the capital opened fire on workers demanding better pay and other job improvements, engineer Saif Mahmod said. One protester was killed.
In Baqubah, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, authorities discovered a car containing the corpses of a local leader of a leading Shiite group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, along with two of his relatives, the Associated Press quoted police as saying.
Also Sunday, an unmanned Air Force Predator drone crashed north of Baghdad.
