In the gloom of my hotel lobby, I learned that many people are either leaving or talking about leaving. The only light comes from the TV, which is tuned to Arabic channels, the staff glued to it because many of them have families in Fallujah. In the lobby of this place, the guests talk about the kidnappings, because it is difficult to move around the city now for fear of being pulled out of a car, and they have nothing else to talk about. Working in the last few days has become nearly impossible, if work means driving around Baghdad and talking to Iraqis. Going outside Baghdad now is regarded as madness. Roads are sprinkled with checkpoints, but it's not clear who runs them. There is a general sense among the foreign contingent that if the militants start killing the hostages, the whole place will go to hell and there will be a rush for the exits. Everyone pays close attention to the fate of the kidnapped foreigners. We watch al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya for new hostage statements. Lately the Arab channels have been running tape of the bodies of two Americans lying in the street in Fallujah. It is hard to tell from the video who they were and what their jobs had been. It is disturbing because there is something triumphant in how al-Arabiya runs the replays of the footage.

Oddly, the Iraqi drivers and translators are full of hopeful tidbits. "The Japanese will be released soon near the border with Jordan," one man told me. But it hasn't happened. Part of the problem is that there are no leaders to talk to; the hostage takers belong to cells that may be in business for themselves. Money might also be behind it, ransoming off the hostages to acquire weapons and materiel for the insurgents, but political motives drive the business as well. It is a symptom of hatred as much as it is politics or greed. It's also true that for every kidnapping, there are unreported near misses. Journalists have been detained at improvised checkpoints, threatened by the insurgents, and then released. It's clear that passports from coalition countries are bad luck, especially those bearing the seal of the United States.

The day I arrived in Baghdad, Rita Leistner and Adnan Khan were driving back from Karbala after covering the Arbaeen festival. Near the Sunni town of Latifiya, south of Baghdad, they stopped to photograph a burning truck and unwittingly stumbled upon an ambush set up for coalition forces. Khan, a contributing editor for Maclean's magazine, was taking photographs close to an abandoned building when he heard shooting coming from inside. As he backed away toward the edge of the village, an insurgent leaned over a wall and started screaming at him with his rifle raised. Another fighter appeared and demanded his camera. Khan gave it to him and tried to explain that he didn't take any pictures of them, but they didn't believe it. After a period of heated negotiation in the village, where local people and their driver argued for their lives, Khan and Leistner returned to their car to find it had been carefully searched by insurgents who wanted to know their nationalities. "They were prepared to kill us. If we'd had American passports, we would have been dead," said Khan. Leistner and Khan are Canadian citizens. Strangely, the threats didn't end when they left the village. On Tuesday, the fighters sent a message to Baghdad through an intermediary, threatening to kill them if there were any further American actions in Latifiya.

And then, early Wednesday Baghdad time, more troubling news: Four mutilated bodies were found at an undisclosed location on the outskirts of Baghdad. Though their identities hadn't been confirmed, they were believed to be four Halliburton workers who had gone missing in recent days.

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