Cisco was rejected by his girlfriend’s father three times, and then one day she called to tell him that her father was bringing another suitor over to meet her. Cisco planted a bomb by their garden wall and set it off.

Since he lived just next door, it was a short manhunt. Cisco was tried and convicted  of terrorism.

“Another guy shot up his girlfriend’s house to force the family to give her in marriage,” Captain Hussein said. “We’ve faced this many times.”

Another police official, Col. Samir Shatti, said he recalled a recent case of a student who had been upset with his grades. So he planted three soda-can bombs in his teacher’s office, wired them in a series with a timer set for 7:30 a.m., when the teacher would normally arrive. The teacher showed up on time, but nothing went off.

Col. Yassir Shinoon relates a variation on the theme worthy of Shakespeare, though the Capulets and Montagues were possibly more civil than the two Iraqi families living on the same street in the Shurta neighborhood of south Baghdad.

The colonel laughed. “We had to put a permanent police checkpoint in to keep them apart,” he said.

The family on one side of the street was Shiite, and their son wanted to marry the daughter of their Sunni neighbor across the street. The son pumped gas when he was not night-riding with the Mahdi Army militia, in the days when the group went out looking for Sunnis to kill. She was studying at Baghdad University and could not stand the sight of him.

In Iraqi society, it was not up to her. But her mother took her side. “How could I accept to marry my daughter, who has a university education, to someone who didn’t even finish primary school?” she said.