Sunday, February 19, 2006
The Killing Season
Playing with the L96A1 - the new sniper weapon unlock available in BF2 1.2 - this weekend reminded me to share pieces of two interesting articles I came across recently:
"Further down, the No6 suspect, Jittakorn Thammetha, might be difficult to miss at a bar. He is known to fire his favourite M-16 and AK47 machine guns overhead when he's drunk."Hunting the Thai Hitmen, Steve Sandford, The Australian, 06 Feb 06.
The Kurdish warlord of this shattered realm was General Rostam Hamid Rahim, known locally as Mam (Uncle). After the oil field incident and its death threats, most of our commutes to Kirkuk from the safety of the protected zone were in Rostam's SUV, with the general himself at the wheel, surrounded by machine-gun equipped pickup trucks full of peshmerga sharpshooters. Each trip was a graphic sortie into the Warrior ethos. But the most chilling insight came from a story that was meant to be faintly comic, related one evening by a friend of the Nadirs.The Kurds In Control, Frank Viviano, National Geographic, Jan 06.
"Mam Rostam was critically wounded," she began, "and in the mid-1990s the peshmerga sent him to Germany, where we were refugees then, for treatment." He remained there for a year, past his convalescence, she went on, "and like all of us, he was required to fill out an employment form when he left the hospital."
The first question read: Previous Job. Rostam immediately scibbled in the German word feldherr, "general." The story had it that he paused only briefly before answering the second question: Special Skills.
"Killing my enemies," he wrote.
ADDED 20 FEB 06:
Is Jarhead to Iraq what Apocalypse Now is to Vietnam? Not sure, but it is a damn good film.
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