BAGHDAD, Jan. 10 -- The masked men in the streets of Iraq's capital see themselves as the good guys. Manning checkpoints and darting through traffic on foot, Iraqi policemen, soldiers and National Guardsmen assume a distinctly defensive posture: rifles up, ski masks down.
"It's part of the uniform," said Ahmed, a first lieutenant with a black woolen balaclava tugged down to the collar of his camouflage jacket. Both jacket and mask are now standard issue for the security forces of Iraq's interim government, newly trained troops who do double duty as hunter and hunted.
Iraqi Interior Ministry police commandos monitor a traffic circle in downtown Baghdad. Iraq's security forces, a favorite target of insurgents, now routinely don masks as part of their uniforms to avoid being identified.
(Karl Vick -- The Washington Post)
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Ahmed and four fellow police commandos said they would not go on duty without their ski masks, give out their full names for publication or tell their neighbors what they really do for a living.
"I say I work installing ceramic tiles," said Wisam, 20, who commutes from south Baghdad.
"I say I'm a car mechanic," said Abu Jaffar, after emerging from a hiding place behind a pickup truck mounted with a machine gun. Even in his mask, he had sought cover after spotting a neighbor getting off a bus 30 feet away.
Intimidation has become the major tool for insurgents trying to thwart the Iraqi government, which is trying to mount nationwide parliamentary elections while establishing a homegrown security force that will give voters a fighting chance of reaching the polls.
Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed in recent weeks, and the fear that insurgents say they aim to instill in Iraq's population of 25 million spreads with every assassination and every leaflet that threatens death for anyone participating in the elections.
Baghdad's deputy police chief and his son were gunned down outside their home Monday, while several National Guardsmen in Baiji, an insurgent hot spot about 125 miles north of Baghdad, said 142 guardsmen had resigned there.
A day earlier, three bodies were found outside the north-central city of Samarra. All were young men with their hands bound behind their backs and multiple gunshot wounds to the face. At least one was a Baghdad police officer. A city council member in Riyadh, in the Sunni Triangle, was thrown into the trunk of a car by armed men.
"We applied for this job to protect our people, even though I was threatened four times by what is called Ansar al-Sunna Army," said Hisham Sattar Jabbar, a police commando, as he tended to wounded colleagues at the site of a massive truck bombing that killed at least 10 people on Jan. 4.
"They say we work for the Americans," Jabbar said. "But we work with the people and for the people."
Public sentiment appears to bolster the sentiment. Opinion surveys show Iraqis support the new security services nearly as strongly as they support the country's religious leadership, a group that receives higher approval than any other institution.
Support is particularly high for police, whose officers are recruited from the towns they serve.
To the discomfort of U.S. officials, however, who tend to be mistrustful of local police units, that also means they often serve as a barometer of public acceptance of the insurgency.
