Lurking in the small ads on page 10 of Al Taakhi newspaper was an announcement that Umar Salman wished henceforth to be known as Samir Salman. It was among many similar notices of submissions to the office of national identity requesting name changes.
The reason is not fashion or whim; it is because in Iraq these days your name can bring death. How dangerous a name Umar has become was revealed in April when Baghdad police discovered 14 corpses of young men, killed and dumped by the death squads. All were Sunnis shot with a single bullet to the head and left on a garbage heap.
One other thing united them in life as in death: their first names were Umar. And now other Umars are fearful.
In the same half page of small ads, Salman Aggal indicated that he wanted to change his daughter's name. She is called Aisha, also a Sunni name. Abdul Karim al-Ithawi announced his intention to change his Sunni tribal name from Ithawi into the neutral al-Barri. A Christian man announced his intention to change his son's first name, from Michael to Ali.
Behind the mundane notices is a shift in Iraqi society towards a world of concealed identities, religious affiliations and family ties.
Sunni families in Shiite areas of Baghdad that are strongholds of the Jaish al-Mahdi, the militia loyal to the firebrand cleric Moqtadr al-Sadr, have placed Shiite religious images on their walls.
Sunni cab drivers in Baghdad, fearful of police and militia checkpoints that may mean abduction, torture and death, have taken to hanging Shiite symbols in their cars or playing Shiite religious music.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
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