HERE ARE the first few grafs of a dispatch from Baghdad yesterday by Carol Rosenberg of the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service: The Iraqi capital these days appears to be awash in gunmen waving or shouldering automatic rifles. Members of a Sunni Muslim-led exile force suddenly set up checkpoints and snarl traffic in one neighborhood. Kurdish bodyguards screen visitors outside political party offices in another. Shiite Muslims pile into Mosques for Friday prayers, casually toting AK-47s they stole from government storehouses.
Three weeks after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s government, quasi-independent militias are carving out turf in the 2,000-square-mile capital, mostly along sectarian lines, much like the Christian, Sunni, and Shiite militias that bedeviled Beirut, Lebanon, or the clans that sliced up the Somali capital of Mogadishu. Part neighborhood watch, part self-styled self-defense force, the Baghdad militias have armed themselves from the ocean of Iraqi army weapons that flooded the streets after the collapse of Saddam’s iron-fisted rule.
