 THE murder scene had all the hallmarks of a brutal gangland slaying. But the motive was not money, revenge or a drug deal gone sour, but an increasingly bloody dispute over the future of a nation. Hadi Salih, a 56-year-old labour rights advocate and official of Iraq's Communist Party, affectionately known by friends as Abu Furat, was found strangled to death with a steel wire in his home, his face beaten to a pulp, his hands bound behind his back. His personal files, containing the names and addresses of colleagues in both the party and the labour federation he led were also stolen, his humble home ransacked. With its signs of politically motivated brutality and torture, the scene resembled the interrogation rooms of deposed president Saddam Hussein's security forces, officials said.
"The people who did this are very clearly members of the Ba'ath Party from the former regime," said Mohammad Jassem al-Abad, a leader of the Communist Party, which is participating in the forthcoming parliamentary elections that insurgents violently oppose. "The way they killed him makes it very clear they're the ones who did this," he said. "It is their methods. His assassination wasn't random."
The violence against activists and political parties is expected to increase as the election date draws near. US and Iraqi officials claim they're making headway in gaining the intelligence to crack the insurgency. They have clamped down on rebel strongholds such as Falluja, Samarra and Baghdad's Haifa Street. They say their raids are netting weapons and suspected insurgents. But despite cracking some ground-level insurgent cells, the authorities admit they have yet to infiltrate or even identify the leadership of the insurgency. "This is a group that has 30 or 40 years of clandestine operation experience and has always lived in pretty great secrecy," the senior US diplomat said last night. "They also tend to be heavy family and clan lash-ups." |