You Ain’t From Around Here, Are You?
MSK at ‘Aqoul answers the musical question, “Just how do those killers at the [Iraqi] roadblocks know who is who?” The downside for my purpose - being able to conclude the sect of named Iraqis quoted in news stories - is “for the outsider, unless it is bleeding obvious (like Shirzad Sinjari or Yohanna Mikha’il or Omar Uthman al-Tikriti or Ali Ridha Hussein al-Najafi) it is next to impossible to pin it down.”
Comment by sean —
December 30, 2006 @ 7:31 pm
That’s a pretty funny post you link to. (Not so funny for those whose daily life it discribes.) It reminds me of how when I was a kid, I wondered how my parents could identify the religion and ethnicity of everyone in my class when I couldn’t. Now, of course, I can mostly do the same with my daughter’s classmates, whereas she is only dimly aware of these issues, mostly by noting who has bat mitzvah parties and who does not. Happily, the various groups at my daughter’s school, though occasionally exluding each other from their respective clubs, aren’t much given to roadblock murders.
Comment by Barry —
December 31, 2006 @ 12:11 am
I guess the answer also involves the, how shall we say, ‘high false positive’ rates that death squads so frequently tolerate. After all, better to kill 10 extra innocent men rather than miss killing the one innocent man they’re after.