It is one of the few images of Abu Deraa, an elusive Shi’ite whose orgy of sectarian killings in the past two years has helped to propel Iraq towards civil war.

The benign video belies Deraa’s savagery. His squad is thought to be responsible for the murder of thousands of civilians, mostly Sunnis, and he is said to take personal delight in killing — sometimes with a bullet to the head, sometimes by driving a drill into the skulls of his victims. On other occasions, Iraqis say, he gives them a choice of being shot or battered to death with concrete building blocks.

Each day the police find more bodies dumped in shallow graves on wasteland known by Iraqis as the macabre “Happiness Hotel”. They have been kidnapped, tortured and murdered after being accused of attacking Shi’ite shrines or of involvement in the daily bombings which are tearing Baghdad apart.

The video shows Deraa, a short, well built and bearded man in his forties, pouring the cola down the camel’s throat. “All of it. Drink to the bottom,” he tells the gulping animal, asking his guards whether they paid for the bottle or took it.

Behind the video is a sinister story. The significance of the camel is that Deraa has vowed to sacrifice it in celebration if he succeeds in killing Tariq al-Hashimi, the Iraqi vice-president.

Hashimi is Iraq’s most important Sunni politician and Shi’ite extremists such as Deraa regard him as a bitter enemy who must be eliminated.

Hashimi was in Downing Street last week for talks with Tony Blair and for the time being he is safe from assassination. But Deraa or another Shi’ite death squad killed his sister and two brothers last year. The hitmen will keep trying to fix him in their sights.

Another of Deraa’s high- profile victims is Khamis al-Obeidi, Saddam Hussein’s lawyer, who was abducted and murdered. A grim video recorded on a mobile phone shows his hands being tied behind his back by a man believed to be Deraa.

He pleads for his life but is put into the back of a Toyota truck and paraded through Baghdad’s vast Sadr city, where the crowds taunt him with Shi’ite slogans and stone him. At one point he is hit on the back of the neck — a big insult to Muslims. The vehicle stops. Obeidi is forced out and Deraa puts three bullets in his head.

In another operation Deraa reportedly acquired a fleet of ambulances and drove them into a Sunni neighbourhood of Baghdad. He tricked groups of young men to come forward and give blood to help Sunni brothers who, he said, were being “slaughtered by the Shi’ites”. But once the young men approached, he trapped and killed them.

By such deeds Deraa has won a reputation as perhaps the single most brutal mass murderer in Iraq. He is seen as a Shi’ite version of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who caused such mayhem before he was killed by the Americans last year.

Infamous though his deeds are, Deraa’s background is cloaked in mystery. One account has it that he hails from the southern marshes, which Saddam drained to punish the Shi’ite inhabitants for rising up after the 1991 Gulf war. It is also said that he was a fishmonger and that his real name is Ismail al-Zarjawi.

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