Crime, resistance make a lethal cocktail for troops

Osama Ahmed Abdel-Rahim was the first to arrive at Noman Hospital, and the only one of three young men to make it alive. The blast of a bomb had blown off his legs, the left one above the shin, the right one at the kneecap. All but his back was burned so badly that flesh flaked off his arms.

When a doctor saw him, Abdel-Rahim was delirious. He screamed for water as medics bandaged his legs and inserted an IV. And with two hours left in his life of 20 years, he shouted the name of the man whom he, his family and neighbours blamed for the accidental explosion of a bomb that may have been prepared for soldiers of the US occupation.

"Why, Abbas, why did you do it?" the doctor, Wael Fadhil, recalled the young man yelling over and over. "Why, Abbas, why did you do it?"

The blast on August 24, in the working-class Baghdad neighbourhood of Waziriya, tore through the third floor of a housing project during what U.S. officials suspect was a failed attempt to build the improvised mines that have become a weapon of choice against US forces.

Neighbours insist that Abdel-Rahim and two other victims, both 15, were innocent. But they tell a different story about a fourth victim, 20-year-old Abbas Sabri Dayikh.

Dayikh's life and, perhaps more telling, death provide a glimpse into the obscure world of the campaign against US troops occupying Iraq – of the interplay between crime and resistance, of the fear that still prevails in the parts of Baghdad where the US pre-sence and police are rarely seen, and of the anger that the lawlessness breeds.

A known criminal, suspected guerrilla and most likely both, Dayikh lived on the fringes of Baghdad's underworld, where residents say US officials and their Iraqi allies are unprepared and ill-equipped to face resistance that has persisted for months.

With attacks against American forces averaging a dozen a day, US officials have suggested that some of those strikes may be freelance operations, as loyalists of former president Saddam Hussain team up with outlaw networks that have shaken residents with increasingly bold kidnappings, carjackings and robberies.

In an economic landscape becoming bleaker, they say, money is the common denominator. "In all probability, some of them may have linked up with former Baathists," said Col. Guy Shields, a military spokesman.

Added Baghdad police Capt. Sabah Nijm, who investigated the bombing: "There are people giving them money to prepare the bombs against the Americans, maybe the police or even other Iraqis. They are young, they have no work, so they deal in danger. Everything that is forbidden is lucrative."

As residents recall, Dayikh was the neighbourhood ne'er-do-well. He brawled a lot, stabbing a neighbour in the shoulder two months ago. Even his family acknowledges he drank tos excess.