BAGHDAD, Iraq — A bomb rips through a women's hair salon, shattering wall-length mirrors and shredding posters of various coiffures.

In another neighborhood, gunmen fire wildly into a busy barbershop, killing the owner and three teenage boys as they wait for haircuts.

At yet another shop, a masked visitor presses a note into the palm of a horrified haircutter. The message: "Our swords are thriving for the neck of barbers."

Iraq's insurgency has long targeted other Iraqis — police, government leaders and national guardsmen — as a means of destabilizing the nascent democracy, but now guerrillas have taken aim at a far more unlikely line of work.

In what some describe as a Talibanlike effort to impose a militant Islamic aesthetic, extremists have been warning Iraqi barbers not to violate strict Islamic teachings by trimming or removing men's beards. Giving Western-style haircuts or removing hair in an "effeminate" manner, they say, are crimes punishable by death.

"They went to all the barbers," said one threatened hairstylist, Ali Mahmood, 28. "They told them not to shave beards. They told them no sideburns. No American styles. They told them none of this or they would die."

Since the threats began a little more than a month ago, at least eight barbers have been killed, and a dozen shops have been bombed, colleagues and police say.

Barbers were not the first to be targeted when Islamic fundamentalism, repressed under Saddam's regime, extended its grip. Militants have bombed many liquor stores run by Christians, and killed their owners. In other cases, women who weren't wearing veils or other clothing deemed proper under strict Islamic law have been threatened and attacked.

Among the first barbers to be victimized was Abu Ahmed, 42, owner of the Sheik Barbershop in southwest Baghdad. About a month ago, two strangers entered his shop with their faces wrapped in scarves and berated the haircutter for shaving beards. They also chastised him for practicing a method of hair removal called "khite," in which a twisted thread is used to catch hairs on the cheek or eyebrows and pull them from their roots.

Ahmed ignored the warnings and continued to trim beards and remove hairs using khite, colleagues said. That is until earlier this month, when he was found splayed over his bicycle, bullets lodged in his head and neck. He remains near death in a Baghdad hospital.

Word of the attacks and threats has struck panic among barbers and hairstylists. Many are quitting their jobs, or are cutting hair for select clients in the secrecy of their homes. Some have hung signs in their shop windows proclaiming, "Dear Customers, we are sorry, but we cannot shave your beard by blade."

The extremists' threats are often delivered on paper fliers, or scrawled on the backs of 250-dinar bills. The 250-dinar denomination represents the cost of one bullet, barbers say.

The threats and killings have occurred primarily in Baghdad's southern and southwestern suburbs, areas to which suspected Fallujah-based fighters fled during the fall bombing campaign by U.S. forces in that Sunni Triangle bastion of the insurgency.

The violence recalls a period in Fallujah's recent history when insurgents controlled the city and imposed a harsh, Taliban-style brand of Islamic law. Beauty parlors were shut down, men were ordered to grow beards, and barbers were forbidden to cut them.

For Iraqi men, a closely cropped head of hair is as much a hallmark of masculinity as a well-groomed mustache, and barbers could earn good money. Now they say it is too risky.

"They give me a piece of paper telling me I will be beheaded if I shave the customer's neck with a blade or if I will remove hair by threads," said barber Karam Mowafaq, 27. "I feel more secure during Saddam's time than now. People are threatening my life just for doing my job."

Mahmood has quit cutting hair after eight years and now works as an armed bodyguard for Western clients. He considers his new job less dangerous than cutting hair.

"It's a losing job," he said. "It's unsafe and it's dangerous."

Special correspondents Caesar Ahmed, Zainab Hussein and Said Rifai in Baghdad contributed to this report.