GHANIM GHUDAYER had just signed a contract to play football in Syria. The forward thought that he had escaped Baghdad’s mean streets, but even the star athlete was not nimble enough to evade the country’s gangs and death squads.

On Sunday night men dressed in military uniforms kidnapped Ghudayer, 22, the top scorer for the Air Force football club in Baghdad and a member of Iraq’s Olympic team. The gunmen pulled up near Ghudayer’s house in the neighbourhood of al-Amal in west Baghdad, grabbed him and sped off in two sports utility vehicles.

Samir Kadhim, the head of the Air Force club, said that the player had been preparing to go to a training session when he was kidnapped. Mr Kadhim said that Ghudayer had signed a one-year contract with a club in Syria and had been planning to leave Iraq within a few days.

Ghudayer’s fate is a mystery, but no one is safe in Baghdad. People are taken en masse from homes and offices by armed men mainly dressed in police uniforms.

Iraq’s sectarian conflict has created a whole new class of victims — those who vanish without a trace.

Kidnappers might be police officers affiliated to a militia, or gunmen pretending to be police. The security forces are so compromised that few trust them. Even the quest to find missing loved ones can lead relatives to their deaths.

The mortuary is the place where anyone still daring to search begins the dangerous task. Officials have endless photographs of mutilated and murdered bodies, some decapitated, displayed on two computer screens.

Distressed relatives scroll through them, asking officials to pause as they peer at the stomach-churning images.

Dhia Jawad Qaddum, a 40-year-old Shia father of three, left home to work in his taxi in Ghazaliya, a dangerous area of west Baghdad. His family never saw him again.

He was not an ex-Baathist or officer and was never threatened, said Hussein, his cousin. “In the first month we went to hospitals and the morgue regularly, then gave up. We thought he must have been kidnapped and hoped the kidnappers would contact us, but it never happened.”

They trawled various government offices in vain. A few weeks later someone threw a grenade through the window of Mr Qaddum’s house, killing his disabled mother. The family stopped looking for him, fearing they might be targeted again. “Since then we consider him dead,” Hussein said.

Sunni officials accuse Shia militias of waiting at the city’s mortuaries to abduct and murder Sunnis who are looking for the missing.

“Now when you go to pick up a corpse you are kidnapped,” said Sheikh Omar al-Jebouri, the Islamic Party’s human rights spokesman. “They take you to Sadr City, where you are tortured and killed, then they bring you to the morgue.”

Sheikh al-Jebouri accused officials working inside the mortuary of tipping off kidnappers. “The procedure is that you get abducted, and they ask for money, $50,000 or $100,000,” he told The Times. Once the gangs have the money, he said, they not only kill the hostage but sometimes eliminate the entire family. Murder at the mortuary is just one of the myriad ways to vanish in Baghdad.

In just 20 minutes, 26 people were herded out of the US- Iraqi Chamber of Commerce and a neighbouring phone shop in Karada in July by men dressed as police. Officials believe that the kidnappers were members of the Mahdi Army of the radical cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, but it is possible that they really were policemen.

In the same month, a gang walked into a meeting of the Iraqi Olympic Committee and marched off 30 people at gunpoint, including the chairman, without anyone trying to stop them. Only ten have been released.

Victims come from all ethnic groups. In July, 45 Shia travelling from Syria were kidnapped from buses in the Sunni guerrilla stronghold of Ramadi in the west.

It is a cruel twist in a country where, under Saddam Hussein, people were arrested and disappeared, their bodies discovered in mass graves after the fall of his regime.

The list of the missing goes on. Bushra Gharawi lost her husband, Salah Jali al-Gharawi, an accountant for the Agence France-Presse news agency, in April. He was kidnapped as he left work by gunmen in two white Land Cruisers with tinted windows and no licence plates.

She has received no news of him. She carries in her purse a picture of him, a small man with grey hair, hugged by two of his teenage sons. She said: “I have to carry on my life. My kids need me. They still have to go to school. My children are missing a friend, not just a father. They still hope he’ll be back.”

She wonders if he is locked away in a secret prison or is dead. “It hurts so much that something bad happened to someone who did nothing. We just need to know what happened.”

Streets of fear

Many kidnappers impersonate the security forces. The problem is so severe that last month the US military announced plans to issue the Iraqi police with new uniforms

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