As atrocities multiply it can be forgotten that Iraqis are the main victims of conflict on their soil, writes Lara Marlowe in Baghdad
Interpreter Amer arrived for work tired and out of sorts the other morning. He hadn't slept at all. "I came back from the Internet café about 9.30 p.m.," he explained. "I saw a piece of paper under the doormat. It was a threat letter."
The handwritten missive was addressed to Amer's brother Said, also an interpreter for foreign journalists.
"To the Muslim Said," it began. "We know that you are working with the American and British criminal journalists. For this we are advising you to stop. Otherwise you will pay the price."
The note ended with a verse from the Koran: "Wherever you go, you will die."
The brothers know the threat is real. At least seven interpreters working for Western journalists have been murdered in the past month in Baghdad, such as Omar Hashim Kamal (48), an interpreter for Time magazine. Kamal ignored several threat letters. He was gunned down on his way to work on March 24th, leaving a widow and a four-year-old son.
The interpreters often had successful careers in other fields before the US invasion. Omar Hashim Kamal had a British degree in computer engineering and was a businessman. But there is little real economic activity in post-war Iraq, and a huge demand for English speakers.
Ironically, many of the press interpreters refused employment with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the US army because they did not want to assist the occupation, and because they knew they'd be seen as "collaborators".
Now they have joined the ever-widening circle of Iraqis threatened with assassination. Media reports focus on 630 US soldiers killed in Iraq, but Iraqis pay a far greater price.
Hundreds of Iraqi policemen have been killed in the bombings of police stations, or picked off during leisure hours. Before he was captured last December, Saddam Hussein called on his supporters to kill Iraqis working for the coalition "even before the Americans".
Judges and city council members are frequent targets. A neighbour of Amer and Said was shot 17 times while playing dominoes with friends in his shop last month. He was a city councillor. Another city councillor was shot by the Americans in Sadr City in December. The former was an assassination, the latter a sloppy error. But the result was the same.
For a long time, Saddam loyalists were thought to be the main assassins. Now, just as Sunni and Shia fundamentalists have joined in the insurrection against coalition forces, they are also believed to have joined in the killings - and, this week, for the first time, in the kidnapping of foreigners.
"If we knew who they were, we would try to talk to them," Amer says of the men who are threatening his brother. "We suspect it's someone he met while working. When you go with a journalist to interview someone, you never know if that person is going to send his gunmen out to kill you."
The brothers did not tell their widowed mother about their dilemma. Said has slept at the home of relatives for the past two nights, but Amer and Said know he cannot hide, and that the entire family is in danger. Gunmen killed the mother and small daughter of an interpreter for Voice of America radio station when they shot the interpreter last month.
The morning after the threat letter, Amer and I had an appointment to see Dr Qais Hassan, a forensic pathologist and the chief statistician at the Baghdad city morgue. US authorities still claim Iraq is improving. Dr Hassan laughed.
"Look at the numbers," he said.
From October until February, the number of Baghdadis shot dead every month stabilised at around 300. That jumped to 413 in March, and Dr Hassan stressed that people killed in bombings or firefights with US forces are not brought to the morgue for autopsy.
Not knowing of Amer's worries, Dr Hassan told us of a spate of killings of medical doctors and professors: Dr Imad Sarsen, specialist in orthopaedics; Dr Mohamed al-Rawi, dean at Baghdad University; Dr Walid Khayal, kidnapped . . .
"I cannot understand why," Dr Hassan said. "Every two or three days, they bring the body of a senior doctor here. We are all trying to leave the country. I feel great sorrow and bitterness. I want to go to Lebanon, Saudi Arabia or the Emirates, but I cannot work there."
A bright young Iraqi I met last week, a computer scientist, asked if I could help him get a visa to Canada or Australia.
"There are hundreds of thousands of people who want to leave Iraq now," Amer said. "The only thing available to us is death."
As we walked towards the parking lot, a green van pulled up to the morgue door, carrying the coffin of Wadah Laith (22). You won't read about him in other newspapers, because Laith was an Iraqi, a security guard like the four Americans who were lynched in Falluja on March 31st. US Marines killed several hundred Iraqis there to avenge them this week. But no one will avenge Wadah Laith.
While the pathologists were concluding that Laith died of a bullet wound to the neck, Laith's colleagues from the security company told me what happened. They have a contract to guard British engineers who maintain electrical generators at Baghdad Airport.
"We were driving home from work at 7.15 last night when two cars full of gunmen pulled up on either side and started shooting," said Tony Sabah (25). "There were three SUVs in our convoy, each with four men in it. We shot back, but they got away."
Gunmen often shoot at four-wheel drive vehicles, merely because they are used by the CPA and foreign contractors.
The young men have been attacked seven times in nine months. Four guards from their company have already been killed, and three others wounded. Of course, they are afraid, but they are paid $350 a month, a good salary in Iraq, and being a security guard is one of the few jobs available other than being a policeman.
"Wadah was about to get married," Tony Sabah said tearfully. "He used his whole pay-cheque to buy furniture."
Another young man with bloodstained trousers and boots - Wadah's blood - did not want to speak.
Fear takes many forms here. When I returned to my hotel, the owner asked me to collect my valuables from the hotel safe.
"I'm taking my family to Mosul for 10 days," he announced. "It's too dangerous here."
As a Christian, he fears a rampage by the Shia of Sadr City, like the looting that followed the fall of the regime a year ago.
The streets of Baghdad were free of traffic this week and many shops closed. Residents of the capital have retreated into their homes, bracing themselves for an explosion that may not happen.
Fighting in Sadr City and Kadhimiya, in which at least 11 US soldiers and some 60 Iraqis were killed, made the whole city nervous.
During the Saddam years, Kanaan Makiya's book Republic of Fear was required reading on the horrors of the Ba'athist regime. But a year after Saddam's overthrow, fear is still omnipresent. Not the fear of the midnight knock on the door by secret police, but fear of car bombs, kidnappers, trigger-happy Americans and vengeful gunmen.
Human life has no value here, according to Amer. And that is the occupation's greatest failure.