Iraq's Cycle Of Bloodletting Continues

By CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan

All I can think about, imagine, is what people must be feeling, hunkered down in their homes. Especially Sunni people tonight. Everyone here remembers what happened last time, when al Qaeda first bombed the holy Shiite shrine in Samarra. The death squads and executions, and revenge killings on both sides, and the piles and piles of unclaimed, un-named Sunni bodies filling up Baghdad's morgues. They still are.

No one knows for sure how it will play out this time. But there is one thing I do know for sure: tonight, somewhere in Baghdad, on one of those blackened streets, someone will pay for this act. Someone innocent, someone unarmed, someone who does not deserve to die this way. They will go into a house, wearing masks and carrying weapons, maybe even wearing police or army uniforms. They will take an innocent man from his bed, or from his family, and they will execute him.

If he's lucky, they will be quick. But if not, they may torture him. Maybe they won't have time. Or maybe they will have too many others to kill. But if they do have time, most likely they will use an electric drill.

Videos show that while al Qaeda prefers beheadings, Shiite militias favor electric drills.

The fascinating part is that they both film these activities and use it to recruit people to their causes. It seems unnatural that this should draw people to worship and serve, rather than drive them away in horror.

Clearly it is an aspect to this war that I personally will never understand.

What I can understand and imagine is the terror when a death squad enters your home in the middle of the night. The anger every time you reach for the light switch or go to open the fridge, and you are reminded there is no power … The pain of losing someone you love, and then another person, and another ... And beyond that, the huge losses people have endured here, so many I fail again to fully comprehend.

One of our CBS colleagues lost his father to a death squad. He was an old man who refused to move when the death notice – to move or be killed – came. So, when he took out the trash, they were waiting for him with guns, and he died in a pool of his own blood where he fell in the street outside his home.

His brother-in-law was also killed by a death squad – inside their home. This was too much for his mother who dropped dead from a heart attack in response. Then when the book market was bombed in Baghdad recently, his nephew went missing. They found only part of his body. Fifteen years old.

Now his nineteen-year-old nephew and his brother have been arrested by the Iraqi Army and disappeared into the black hole of Iraq's prisons where there is no access to anything even resembling justice for tens of thousands of people.

There are more than forty thousand prisoners in U.S. and Iraqi custody already, and the number is rising every day. One of the little-noticed points that America's top general made in his first press conference after arriving in Baghdad earlier this year was that they would be building more prisons during the surge. Iraq under Saddam Hussein, he said, actually had a comparatively small prison system compared to its neighbors in the region.

And it's filled to overflowing already.

No doubt in the wake of the latest bombing in Samarra, there will be more arrests. Many more.

Who knows how many of those will be innocent men? And who will care when they lock them behind bars and leave them there to rot? Not the U.S. They don't even have access to the Iraqi prison system- for the most part. It is Iraqi run – and this is a sovereign country.

The Iraqi people who do care have no power to get them released unless they know people in positions of influence. This is the measure many of them use to judge the progress of the surge: what is happening to their loved ones after Iraqi and American security forces take them away. Of course, they all say their loved ones are innocent, but the fact is that some of them really are.

I can hear the wind whistling angrily around my hotel as I write. It feels like it would be cold, but I know the moment I step outside I will be hit by a stifling onslaught of hot, dry air that sucks your breath right out of you and dries the water in your eyes.

Somewhere out there, someone is enduring the worst night of their life as the world wonders what this bombing will do to Iraq. Already six Sunni mosques have been torched, and one of them completely destroyed.

Within hours of the Golden Dome attack, mortars were falling on Sunni neighborhoods, and the streets were packed with Iraqi's trying to make it home before the city-wide curfew imposed by the Prime Minister. There wasn't enough time for everyone to make it so the curfew was pushed back a few hours. Then an eerie, unhappy emptiness settled on the streets.

Just as all of this was happening, the call came out over the loudspeaker of a mosque across from our building. It wasn't specific, but to the Iraqis around us the message was very clear. It was an order, they said. This is not the right time of day for the call to prayer. This was an order.

"To do what," I asked, "can you be more specific?"

"An order to start." That was the answer.

Start what?

Start killing on a greater scale than is already going on. Start killing more Sunnis for being Sunni – punish them. Then, more Shia will be killed for being Shia. And so it goes on.

The killing will be on both sides. But the Shia say more of them have been killed and they are only retaliating in self-defense. The Sunnis will say they are fighting for their own survival.

Self-defense. And survival.

It's hard to see that when you know a death squad victim was taken in his pajamas in the dead of night and tortured to death with electric drills. Or when I look at the face of the young Iraqi interpreter sitting on my deak. His Marine Corps ID card tells me he was most likely an interpreter for them. His presence there on my desk reminds me that he was killed for being Sunni after being tried by an Islamic Sharia court run by Shiite militiamen, and his ID card was given to me as proof. Given to me by an Iraqi whose own life was already under threat, along with his pregnant wife and baby son who are already in hiding.

On and on it goes here. It's not even ties between families and friends anymore. It is a spider web of tragedy and loss linking every family.

And, in the midst of it, there are good people, and good soldiers on both sides who are trying so hard to do the right thing.

You see them, and the huge amount of effort and personal sacrifice they are willing to endure. And you see many of them being overwhelmed, but still fighting the good fight every day.

What does it mean when the only way to secure a city is to lock its citizens indoors?

What does it say when people believe the curfew won't protect them because it will give free reign to death squads operating in police uniforms and government vehicles?

What does it mean when Iraqi police and government guards who were guarding the Golden Mosque could not protect one of the most sacred places in the whole of Iraq, especially since it has been threatened before and is clearly still a target?

It means there are no easy solutions. And maybe no good solutions either.

This attack was clearly meant to push Iraq deeper into chaos and ensure the cycle of bloodletting continues.

But, it also exposes the intentions of those who really will stop at nothing to see the U.S. fail in Iraq.

What I see is the face of a young Iraqi man staring up at me from his marine corps ID card, and I wonder if his family even know he is dead.
Lara Logan