Just before midnight on Friday, Shiite militiamen in eight black S.U.V.’s rolled up to the Baghdad home of an important Sunni politician and abducted him and four of his bodyguards, a brazen move that threatened to further convulse a country already in the grip of a political crisis. For hours at a secret location on Baghdad’s southeastern edge, the bodyguards said, they were beaten with a lead pipe, their tormentors demanding that they admit that their boss, Riyadh al-Adhadh, the president of Baghdad’s provincial council, was preparing to support an invasion of the capital by Sunni militants fighting under the banner of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, who are in control of large amounts of territory in the north and west of Iraq. The episode, which ended with the eventual release of the five men, was a vivid portrayal of what Iraqi politics looks like […]