Selim Amer’s wife had been badgering him to take her out of the house. She had not been out since giving birth three months ago and was getting cabin fever.

He knew that the streets of Amel, in southwest Baghdad, were dangerous. But on Saturday night he finally relented and walked her to the local market to buy ice cream and do some shopping. He took his brother as an extra precaution.

What they witnessed on the way was worse than either could have imagined — even after four years of war — and would rip apart their mixed Sunni-Shia neighbourhood in a frenzy of hatred and bloodlust.

Near the shops, a group of children — Sunni and Shia — were playing football on an empty site. As Selim, his wife and brother, walked past, two cars pulled up. Four or five men in tracksuits got out and opened their car boots. They pulled out belt-fed BKC machineguns, a weapon known in Iraq as “the harvester” for its ability to kill lots of people quickly.

“We heard the shooting of the machineguns. It was so loud and continuous we thought they were targeting us,” said the 28-year-old Shia, his eyes red and brimming with pain.

But they were not the targets.

“I started looking, and they are shooting the kids,” he said. “Eight of the kids already fell on the ground. The guys kept shooting, they just wanted to make sure everyone was dead.”

More than a month after the new American-Iraqi security plan was launched in Baghdad, those who want to sow chaos and civil war are adopting horrific tactics to ensure stability does not prevail. In Amel they achieved that goal with stunning effect.

“I saw something I’ll never forget. I saw people . . . they just went crazy,” Selim said.

As the killers drove away unharmed the local men rushed home to fetch their guns. Instead of trying to catch the gunmen or help their victims, Sunnis began shooting at Shia houses and Shias began firing on Sunnis.

“It was so horrible, you saw neighbours who’d been sitting outside together shooting at each other,” Selim said.

One mother kept running up and down her staircase, looking for her son, even though she knew he was lying dead.

As the neighbours blasted away at each other no one dared to venture out to help the children bleeding on the makeshift pitch for two hours, until people started to run out of ammunition. It was only when the firing subsided that the nine small bodies were picked up and taken to the mortuary of Yarmouk hospital.

In the Interior Ministry’s daily report they were simply listed as nine children killed in random attacks — a statistic lost in a day of bombings that killed almost 50 people nationwide.

“If they’d picked up the kids right away some of them might have survived,” Selim said. “Not one of them even dared to get their kids, they were moved more to get revenge. This is the problem with this country, there’s no security plan or reconciliation plan that will stop revenge. This country will not survive.”

Selim, an educated, articulate young man who has worked as a translator and reporter for a number of western organisations, said he could understand the homicidal rage that possessed a bereaved parent.

“If someone killed my son, I don’t know what I’d do, but I’d kill more people,” he said. He now regrets having had a child in such hard times, and even getting married. “It’s too much responsibility on my shoulders,” he said.

The constant killing is also eroding his moderate view of the world. Two months ago he hated the Mahdi Army, the Shia militia responsible for many of the death squads chasing Sunnis from mixed areas of the capital. They murdered one of his friends just because he was a Sunni who had friends from both communities, and then threatened to burn down the houses of his Shia friends. But with the sectarian divide growing despite the American military’s best prepared security plan, Selim now looks to the Mahdi Army to protect him and his fellow Shia. “The only ones who can do this is the Mahdi Army. The Sunnis feel the same way about the insurgency,” he said, recalling how long his mixed neighbourhood had resisted the tug of sectarian hatred. Now it has sunk into the black hole of rage and vengeance.

“I feel I want these [Mahdi Army] guys here and if they want to kick out the Sunnis, it’s not my problem,” he said.

Worse, Selim said that the pent-up rage that exploded in Amel on Saturday had been simmering for a long time among the people he knew.

“People want it, they want a declared civil war so they can settle everything. Reconciliation plans or whatever will settle nothing, we want people on the ground to settle this . With no effective leadership or security forces to protect them, he said that many people thought a fury of bloodletting was the only way now.

Innocent victims

— One in four Iraqi children under five years of age is chronically malnourished.

— One in eight die before their fifth birthday.

— Infant mortality rose from 40 per 1,000 in 1990 to 102 in 2005.

— Access to education is an increasing problem. Many teachers have fled the country and parents often keep their children away from school because of fears for their safety.

— Only 5.7 per cent of children between the ages of three and five attend pre­schools.

— In 2004 it was estimated than 85 per cent of Iraq's existing 14,000 schools were in need of rehabilitation.

— March 19, 2007 Guerrillas use two children to fool American checkpoint soldiers into thinking that they were a harmless family. When the car had passed it stopped and the adults ran out, detonating the car with the children still in the back.

— January 27, 2007 At least five schoolgirls were killed in Baghdad when two mortars hit their high school.

— July 13, 2005 More than 30 Baghdad youngsters, aged between six and 15, were killed when a suicide bomber in a car attacked the American Humvee they had gathered around. US soldiers had been handing out sweets to the children

— September 30, 2004 A bomb attack on the opening ceremony for a refurbished sewage plant in Amal killed 35 children

Source: UNICEF, Times archives

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