After a harrowing ordeal, the abducted men were returned to their homes on Saturday afternoon. The bodyguards were bruised and in tears as they were helped from vehicles, but they were alive, and the potential political crisis the episode could have set off seemed to have been averted for the moment. To celebrate their return, a sheep was slaughtered, women threw candies in the air and men fired long bursts of celebratory gunfire across the roofs of the densely packed Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya.

"We are living in a jungle," Mr. Adhadh said in an interview at his home shortly after his release.

A portion of Iraq — Mosul in the north and much of Anbar Province in the west — is under control of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. There are contested areas to the north and east of the capital, near Tikrit and Samarra and in Diyala Province, where fighting rages and where a brutal sectarian war seems to be unfolding. On Saturday, all five members of a Shiite family, including children, were found beheaded in the town of Taji. On Sunday, Shiite militiamen hung the bodies of at least six Sunni militants from streetlights and a bridge in Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province.

In Baghdad, though, where political leaders are struggling to keep the country together, a different picture has emerged. The wholesale sectarian slaughter that nearly tore the country apart in 2006 and 2007 has not yet returned, but militias, loyal to a sect or sometimes to just a man, are back. And the mass arrests of Sunni men, at the heart of grievances that allowed the insurgency to gain support within the Sunni community, have continued. It is a gangland culture deeply intertwined with the culture of Iraqi politics.

The effort to win Mr. Adhadh's release involved the new speaker of Parliament and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, as well as pressure on Iraqi leaders from Western diplomats who feared that the episode would further destabilize the political situation and heighten sectarian tensions.

But it was the direct intervention of a powerful militia leader that ultimately secured Mr. Adhadh's freedom: Qais al-Khazali, the leader of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a Shiite militant and political group with close ties to Iran. The group once fought the Americans, and more recently has fought in Syria's civil war on the side of the government of President Bashar al-Assad.