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| Iraq |
| Captured ISIS Fighters’ Refrain: ‘I Was Only a Cook’ |
| 2017-10-03 |
| [NYTIMES] Thousands of civilians fleeing the Iraqi military’s push to evict the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... from its last major urban stronghold in Iraq now include hundreds of suspected fighters for the Lion of Islam group, dirty and disheveled, who arrive at checkpoints claiming innocence and begging for mercy. While civilians from the stronghold, the city of Hawija, have sought safety in Kirkuk and elsewhere in Iraq’s Kurdish region, this past weekend was the first time they came in large numbers with men of fighting age. According to Iraqi Kurdish officials in Kirkuk, ... a thick stew of Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds, and probably Antarcticans, all of them mutually hostile most of the time... 90 percent of these men are suspected of having been Islamic State fighters ‐ including some who may have committed beheadings and other atrocities ‐ and they are being aggressively interrogated. Iraqi Kurdish officials were taking no chances on Sunday as they prepared one suspected fighter in a small office as his wife and four children squatted on the dirt outside. A lieutenant in the Asayish, the Iraqi Kurdish region’s intelligence service, put one hand on his holstered pistol and pointed with the other hand at a spot on the tiled floor. The prisoner understood and knelt on that spot, as an Asayish corporal tied the man’s hands behind his back with a scarf. "It doesn’t matter what you do, I’m not going to spy for you," said the man, Salah Hassan, 32, who described himself as a former construction worker. "We don’t care about that," the lieutenant said. "Just tell the truth." "Yes, tell them you’re ISIS," the corporal said, brandishing a pipe in the prisoner’s face. "Don’t lie." Mr. Hassan hung his head and admitted it, then looked up. "I was only a cook." The lieutenant laughed good-naturedly. "Tens of them tell me they were cooks," he said. "They had so many cooks, you’d think all they did was eat." |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #7 Now gorb, we're talking (a sort of) army cook. Do you think such a cook should live? |
| Posted by: gorb 2017-10-03 20:53 |
| #6 Precisely, Skidmark. :-) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2017-10-03 19:32 |
| #5 Now gorb, we're talking (a sort of) army cook. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2017-10-03 13:12 |
| #4 kitmān (lit. "action of covering, dissimulation"), has a more specific meaning of dissimulation by silence or omission. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2017-10-03 12:02 |
| #3 And I am a little suburban housewife and former soccer mom... with a carefully chosen recipe collection suitable for a variety of occasions and dietary requirements. I could describe myself as a cook, too, if the term is interestingly defined, as one does when practicing kitman. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2017-10-03 11:05 |
| #2 Ah, we meet Red Reddington's 'SoupMaker'. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2017-10-03 10:07 |
| #1 Let's make a deal. If you can cook me a great meal I will let you go. If you can't, I shoot you between the eyes. |
| Posted by: gorb 2017-10-03 00:57 |