American journalist shot dead in Iraq

By Michael Georgy

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – An American journalist has been found
shot dead in Basra four days after he wrote an opinion piece in
the New York Times criticizing the spread of Shi’ite Islamist
fundamentalism in the southern Iraqi city.

Witnesses said Steven Vincent and a translator were
kidnapped by gunmen shortly after leaving a hotel on Tuesday
evening. His body was found later that night, a U.S. diplomat
said. A nurse said he had been shot repeatedly in the chest.

Vincent’s death appeared to mark the first targeted killing
of a Western journalist in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion
toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Other reporters have been killed after being swept up in
the violence plaguing the country, but were apparently killed
for being Westerners rather than because they were journalists.

“An investigation has been launched to determine who was
behind this,” said the U.S. diplomat.

A nurse in a Basra hospital said Vincent, a freelance
investigative journalist and art critic from New York City who
had been working in Basra for several weeks, had been shot
three times in the chest.

His Iraqi translator, Nouriya Ita’is, was shot four times
but survived. The nurse said she was in a serious condition.

The New York Times opinion piece criticized the failure of
British forces to clamp down on what Vincent described as a
city that was “increasingly coming under the control of Shi’ite
religious groups, from the relatively mainstream … to the
bellicose followers of the rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.”

The article also focused on the Basra police force, quoting
a police lieutenant as saying a few officers were perpetrating
many of what he said were hundreds of assassinations of mostly
former members of Saddam’s Baath party each month.

Iraqi Arab Sunni leaders have accused the Iraqi government
of sanctioning Shi’ite hit squads that work alongside security
and police forces. The religious Shi’ite-led government denies
the accusations.

Iraq has faced rising sectarian violence since January
elections empowered Shi’ites for the first time and sidelined
Arab Sunnis, who were dominant under Saddam and are now leading
the insurgency.

GROWING FUNDAMENTALISM

Sunni Muslim militants from across the Arab world have
mounted suicide bombings that have killed hundreds of Shi’ites.
Al Qaeda and other hardline groups have kidnapped more than 150
foreigners. Many were freed and some were shot or beheaded.

Vincent was the author of a book on postwar Iraq and was
researching another one about the history of Basra, where
around 8,000 British troops are based.

He has published in the Wall Street Journal, U.S. magazine
Harper’s and the Christian Science Monitor. He also maintained
a regular weblog of his experiences in Iraq.

A local Iraqi journalist who had worked with Vincent said
he had been speaking to a range of people in Basra for his
research, including Iraqi officials and Christian residents.

Aside from a few attacks on British soldiers and Iraqi
police, Iraq’s second city Basra has been relatively free of
the suicide bombings and assassinations gripping other parts of
the country.

But residents say Shi’ite fundamentalists have been gaining
control over the city. Christian alcohol sellers have been
threatened and their shops damaged, residents say.

The cleric Sadr, who staged two violent uprisings against
U.S. troops, is one of the Shi’ite clerics with followers and
influence in Basra, 550 km (340 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

The Badr Brigades, the Iranian-trained militia of the main
Shi’ite party in Iraq’s government, has been accused of
assassinating Sunnis and imposing a fundamentalist ideology in
parts of the country. (Additional reporting by Abdel-Razzak
Hameed in Basra)