A sinister tale from Iraq. But does anyone else find the scariest bit that the mystery voice who threatened her identified itself as the "Kata'eb al-Jihad"? Yes, that's Kata'eb as in the Lebanese Phalange's Arabic name. Not that the originals would have had any truck with jihad, but it strikes me that it's a great name to adopt if you want to terrify anyone in the Middle East, and also that the environment of Iraq is an excellent one for the growth of good old-fashioned fascism.
And then I remembered that a plane that flew a huge quantity of cash out of Iraq to Beirut turned out to have a Lebanese Forces MP aboard, a plane owned by something called Flying Carpet in Beirut owned by one Mazen Bsat.
Or perhaps, it's our own side's supersmart electronic warfare? I ask only having read this report about Coalition electronic/information warfare in Iraq. Yes, they really are flying EC-130s around fiddling with the GSM network when they could just hook in to the SS7 switch's lawful intercept function. But what amused me was the special "network exploitation system" that allows you to become the sysadmin...errr...so long as it doesn't attack one of your own radio nets.
Wouldn't it just be less stupid to teach some people Arabic?
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