SAAD RASHID is just another statistic in Iraq’s war. The farmer and father of seven was driving through Baghdad when two cars filled with gunmen raked his vehicle with bullets.

Badly wounded, he dragged himself from his car and tried to run. His attackers shot him in the legs, then walked up and finished him off. It was 11am in a crowded street.

“I collected him from the mortuary. He had 12 bullets in him and they had shot him through the mouth,” Akram Hussein, 28, his nephew, said.

“He had no obvious enemies, but he was a Shia from the Amiri tribe, and that was reason enough for him to be attacked.”

Mr Rashid, 42, joined the ranks of hundreds of ordinary Iraqis murdered this year in seemingly random violence. Some are shot at home or in the street. Others are abducted and found floating in the Tigris, their hands bound and throats cut. Each dawn reveals bodies dumped by the roadsides or on rubbish tips.

Some are killed individually or in small groups. Others, such as with the barely publicised discovery of 22 bodies on Tuesday near al-Kut, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, are killed in large numbers. Their deaths are the background to more spectacular outrages on Iraq’s march to a potential civil war.

“Hundreds of Iraqis have died like this in the past eight to nine months,” said John Pace, head of the UN Human Rights Office for Iraq. “The number has increased exponentially in the past five months and remarkably in the last three. The pattern is regular; it’s systematic and we must presume there is a sophisticated form to these attacks.”

The reasons behind the daily tit-for-tat murders are many, with sectarianism just one. Mr Rashid’s family are sure that he was targeted as part of a vicious Shia-Sunni turf war.

The head of the Amiri tribe, Hadi al-Amiri, leads the Badr organisation, the militia wing of the dominant Shia political party. Hated and feared by Sunnis, Badr members and their extended families are seen as legitimate targets by Sunni death squads. This year an al-Amiri wedding was hit by a suicide bomber and 22 family members were killed. Since then other relatives have been abducted and murdered.

They are believed to be victims of the Umar Brigade, a special unit established in Iraq three months ago by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s commander in Iraq, specifically to trace and kill Badr members and their relatives. So far the Shia have born the brunt of the onslaught.

“I’m often amazed at how the Shia take it,” Colonel Edward Cardon, an American brigade commander in Baghdad, said. “They don’t retaliate because they are in power. They have the political power right now, therefore can afford to show some restraint.”

But a report this month by the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq included allegations of extensive extra-judicial killings of Sunnis by the Shia-dominated Iraqi security forces. It included an incident last month when the bodies of 36 men were found, also near al-Kut. They bore signs of torture and were blindfolded and handcuffed.

Relatives said that they had been detained in an operation carried out by the Interior Ministry. A senior American officer confirmed that the coalition was hunting a Shia death squad assassinating Sunnis. It has investigated Interior Ministry units thought to be responsible, but has yet to find the culprits.

Times Recommends

• Rio Tinto four held as China prepares case
• Diplomats must keep heads down and trousers up
• When in Rome should one make like Berlusconi?