An American journalist has been found shot dead in Basra four days after he wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times criticising 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 criticised 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. magazineHarper’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.
