The five sport-utility vehicles sat abandoned in the darkness. A faint beeping sound signaled that their doors were open. Some of the Iraqi police who arrived at the scene initially feared going near the cars, thinking the sound meant they were rigged to explode. Finally a few ventured closer. In the back of two of the vehicles were the four Americans. One of them was alive, though barely. Handcuffed, he had been shot in the back of the head, but he was breathing. The other soldiers were already dead. One had taken bullets in both legs and his right hand, and at some point the kidnappers had torn open his body armor and fired bullets into his chest and torso. Two others were handcuffed together, with one’s right hand joined to the other’s left. Two shots in the face and neck had killed one. Four bullets in the chest had killed the other. None of the soldiers had identification. The killers had taken everything from the men’s pockets before fleeing the scene. In his last moments, one of the soldiers, a young lieutenant, realized his body might be unidentifiable when he was discovered. In the dust caked on one of the vehicles he managed to write his last name, Fritz, a final act before dying. To many Americans, the Jan. 20 murder of four U.S. soldiers on a deserted road in southern Iraq might sound similar to countless other tragedies in a bloody, brutal war. There was a firefight, which killed another American; a brazen abduction; then a frantic chase leading to a heartless end. And yet from the start, the deaths of the five Americans were also shrouded in mystery. The attack took place in Karbala, a Shi’ite holy city of roughly 1 million people that had been one of the safest in Iraq for U.S. troops. It happened in plain sight of Iraqi police the Americans had been assigned to train. The killers wore U.S.-style uniforms, suggesting a catastrophic lapse of security –or the possibility that the enemy operation had actually been an inside job. The military has struggled to affix responsibility for the Karbala murders. U.S. commanders have accused the Quds Force, a paramilitary organization run by members of Iran’s security establishment, of being behind the operation. On July 2 in Baghdad, the military revealed it was holding Ali Musa Daqduq, a Lebanese national who was captured in Basra in March. He is a senior operative of Hizballah
