An update on a story I recently linked to:
Some of you may know that the Iraqi national coach and the nation's No. 1 and No. 4 players were murdered recently - the newspaper reports said it was because they wore shorts in public. This, according to Haider [Abbud, a political/cultural advisor who is with the NATO training mission in Iraq], is false. They were killed because one of the players, who hailed from a town that is a hotbed of the insurgency, was approached and asked to drive a car bomb and detonate it in a neighborhood said to be frequented by Americans.
The player refused, partly because there were no longer foreigners in that neighborhood, just Iraqis. So the insurgents changed their plans and killed the tennis players instead. "It had nothing to do with wearing shorts," Haider told me. "These guys were very traditional and correct about things like that."
We need to be more aware of the hideous blackmail being played against ordinary Iraqis by the Jihadists, and others empowered by the anarchy Rumsfeld unleashed.