THERE were so many reasons not to kill Atwar Bahjat. She was half Sunni, half Shia, a woman, an Iraqi, 30 years old, a native of Samarra and a renowned journalist for the Dubai-based al-Arabiya news channel.

Yet kill her they did. They shot her to death on a dusty road six miles north of her home town as she reported on the bomb that wrecked Samarra’s sacred Shia shrine on Wednesday.

She died with two colleagues — early victims in a frenzy of revenge killings that has dragged Iraq to the brink of civil war. Being half Shia was not enough to save her. For three years the fragile truce between Iraq’s once-dominant Sunni minority and long-oppressed Shia majority had held in the face of suicide bombs in market places, car bombs outside police stations and corpses found in ditches.

That truce is now at breaking point. Across Baghdad and other cities Shia death squads have been tracking down and butchering Sunnis. Scores of Sunni mosques have been attacked, some of their Imams killed or abducted. The curfew has been extended, and all police and army leave cancelled.

By last night the death toll was nearing 200, and Sunni politicians ended talks on forming a new government with the Shia alliance. The Iraq whose outline was that of Atwar Bahjat’s trademark gold pendant was at risk of sundering.

Ms Bahjat, famed for her courageous frontline reporting, had driven towards Samarra with her cameraman, Khaled Mahmud al-Falahi, and soundman, Adnan Khairallah. On the edge of the city they found their way blocked by security checkpoints so Ms Bahjat made two live transmissions from where she was, interviewing citizens of Samarra who condemned the bomb blast. By her third and final report, at 6pm local time, Ms Bahjat appeared strained and tired. “She began calling us just after 6pm,” said Dhia al-Nasseri, a colleague at al-Arabiya’s office in Baghdad yesterday. “She was worried. The place was very dangerous. She needed to get into Samarra but the roads were blocked. It was a long way back and night was falling. She called us and various officials, asking for help.”

Reports from a fourth crew member, who escaped the killings, suggested that some of the small crowd became hostile. Then, as dusk fell, a pick-up arrived bearing two gunmen. “The survivor said they were Iraqis with local accents,” Ms al-Nasseri said.

The men leapt from the pick-up and demanded the correspondent. Ms Bahjat appealed to the crowd for help. None came. The gunmen began firing in the air. People fled, the fourth crewman among them. Ms Bahjat was not seen alive again. Her body, and those of two colleagues, were found by police yesterday near their bullet-riddled satellite-dish van.

Ahmed al-Saleh, al-Arabiya’s Baghdad correspondent, said: “She loved her country and died because of her impartiality.”

A statement from al-Arabiya said: “Again, al-Arabiya pays the ultimate price for persistently pursuing the truth.” The station has had 11 employees killed by US and insurgent attacks in Iraq since the US invasion.

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