BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 21 — The Lazim family lost all four of its men early Wednesday morning.
A man walked up to them as they got out of their pickup truck at a house they were building and sprayed them with gunfire. The youngest, 12, was asleep in the back. Two bullets tore through his chest.
In the patterns of violence in this city, sectarian killings like this one — the Lazims are Shiites and blame Sunni insurgents — have become routine, barely registering as blips on the screens of the authorities, and sometimes vanishing without ever being counted.
But behind each number is a story of piercing loss, one of fresh hardships for those who survive and of vivid memories of their last moments with loved ones.
The four men — Jodeh, 50, and his three sons, Falah, 25; Salah, 20; and Ali, 12 — left behind a family of women: a wife, nine daughters and a daughter-in-law. On Friday, the first day of mourning, they dressed in long black abayas, some with sleepy children in their arms, and received relatives from Kut and Basra in the south.
Deprived of the $67-a-day total that the four brought in, the women have no obvious means of support.
On a mat in the corner of a spare room in Sadr City, a poor Shiite neighborhood of back alleys, open sewage and brightly colored flags, Jodeh's widow, Ghazala Kamel, lamented her family's fate. They might have survived: the pickup would not start that morning and had to be pushed to get moving. Her youngest son, Ali, said he was tired, but his father, knowing that just two days of work on the house remained, told him he had to come and help.
Ali had quit school two years ago to help support his family, a practice not unusual for poor Shiites here.
"I made them breakfast, rice and sauce," she said, rocking slightly.
Mr. Lazim's nephew Sattar Awad, a philosophy student with an open face, learned of the deaths when he called one of the brothers' phones that morning, and a soldier answered saying he had been killed.
Those responsible were Sunni extremists bitter at losing power, Mr. Awad said. "They were pushed out, so they started to kill people to get control of the country back," he said.
Mrs. Kamel, in the corner, was too consumed by sadness to offer a theory. "I buried these four with my hands," she said, holding her hands in front of her and shaking them. "I saw them washing their bodies. They were so handsome. So handsome."
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30 Iraqis Die in Attacks Across the Nation
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 23 — More than 30 Iraqis died in car bombings, drive-by shootings, assassinations and other attacks on Tuesday, including 11 killed when a bomber riding a motorbike detonated his explosives at a falafel stand after dinnertime near a heavily Sunni area of northern Baghdad.
The killings, whose victims included children and a university professor, underscored the tremendous challenges facing the new government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. He is trying to find candidates for Iraq's three security ministries who will not be vetoed by the rival political groups in his fragile coalition.
One day after Mr. Maliki predicted that American and British troops would be able to withdraw from all but two provinces by the year's end, Bush administration officials repeatedly tried Tuesday to tamp down expectations that major troop withdrawals could occur quickly.
"We are not going to harness ourself to an artificial timetable," said Tony Snow, the White House spokesman. "The conditions on the ground tell us that our job's not done."
The deputy director for regional operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, said at a news conference at the Pentagon that he was unaware of any plans for a specific number of troops to be withdrawn.
"You can't do it too fast," General Ham said. "We've talked some about rushing to failure, and we've got to be very careful to not do that."
And in a stark admission of the security problems Iraq faces, three years after President Bush asserted that "major combat operations" in Iraq were complete, the American ambassador to Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, acknowledged that American forces do not control regions of western Iraq.
"I believe that parts of Anbar are under the control of terrorists and insurgents," Mr. Khalilzad said in an interview on CNN. Anbar Province stretches from Falluja, just west of Baghdad, all the way to the Syrian and Jordanian borders. The province has long been a stronghold of Sunni insurgents, and residents along the Euphrates River say the group once known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and similar organizations hold sway in some towns.
For his part, Mr. Bush pledged Tuesday that he would make a "new assessment" of what Iraq's military needs are, now that a constitutionally elected government has taken power.
"We haven't gotten to the point yet where the new government is sitting down with our commanders to come up with a joint way forward," Mr. Bush said during an appearance with the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert.
"Trying to stop suiciders — which we're doing a pretty good job of on occasion — is difficult to do," he added.
Indeed, the relentless killings throughout Iraq have called into question whether some regions will ever be stable enough that American troops can be pulled out without risking a tumble into civil war.
In Sadr City, the huge Shiite slum in eastern Baghdad, a car bomb in a crowded marketplace killed 5 people and wounded at least 15 about 6 p.m. on Tuesday, an Interior Ministry official said.
In eastern Baghdad, a bomb in a parked car detonated late Tuesday morning as a convoy of Iraqi commandos passed by, killing five Iraqis and wounding five more, according to the official. Gunmen also assassinated a professor and a Ministry of Industry official.
