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In your name, people. In your name.

On a visit four weeks ago, Mahdi Army militiamen, including one who sat in a yellow plastic chair in the middle of the road, stopped cars and demanded:

"Why are you here? What is your tribe?"

His tribal name didn't help Khelan Jassim Muhammed, 46, a grocer and father of six girls, from becoming a victim of the killing in Hurriyah.

Two weeks ago, he moved from Tobji to Hurriyah to occupy a house left empty by relatives who had moved to the United Arab Emirates. Muhammed, his relatives said, felt safe. He was a Shiite from the Ajaeli tribe.

Last Wednesday, he left his home in the morning and never returned. After a frantic search, his brothers found his body the next morning in the morgue. His corpse had been discovered in a trash dump in a Shiite neighborhood.

"He was handcuffed from the back and had two bullets holes in the back of his head," Khatan Jassim, 41, one of his brothers, said Sunday. As he finished the sentence, silence fell upon his family's spare, white-lit living room, where seven relatives were seated in a semicircle. Before they sat down on a large red carpet, they said a prayer, their palms facing upward in the Shiite tradition. They had lived all their lives in Tobji, just down the road from the empty Sunni Arab house.

Khatan Jassim, a taxi driver with a wide nose, thick neck and sun-leathered skin, said his brother's death bore the trademark of the Mahdi Army.

There are Sunnis and Shiites in the Ajaeli tribe, he explained. His brother, he added, was also carrying an identification card issued in Abu Ghraib, a Sunni area.

"There was a misunderstanding from the Sadr office," Jassim said. "They didn't know he was a Shia."

At the funeral, Sadr's representatives came to offer their condolences. Jassim confronted them. They denied any involvement.

"They gave us an excuse," Jassim recalled. "They said, 'Why would we kidnap him and dump his body in a dumpster? We control the neighborhood. We could have gone inside his house and killed him.' "

Sadly, the fact that all of this might come to pass after removing Saddam from power could have been predicted by someone with even a basic understanding of Iraqi history. It was by no means guaranteed, of course, but it was always a very real possibility. And yet people who should know better act as if all of this was a surprise.