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Your Name is Everything; In Iraq, the wrong ID in the wrong place can get you killed.
Byline: Sarah Childress (With bureau reports)
Tahsin Ahmed couldn't believe his son Omar, 14, wanted to change his name. A Shiite married to a Sunni, Ahmed had raised his children not to believe in sectarian differences. The boys were proud to be named after two great caliphs. But now Omar was sobbing. He begged to be called Hassan or Hussein--anything Shiite, like his twin, Ali--and refused to go to school, where he said his teacher had cornered him and demanded to know if he was secretly Sunni. "That's a very dangerous name to have," the professor had told the boy.
Furious, Ahmed complained to the Shiite-dominated Ministry of Education. There he was told, "Why not just change his name? The problem will be solved." After all, the bureaucrat added, "what reasonable [Shiite] guy would call his son Omar?" Fearing for his son's life, Ahmed reluctantly bought him a fake ID with a new, Shiite name. Which? He's not saying.
In Iraq these days, the wrong name can get you killed. By law, all Iraqis carry jinsiyas, or national ID cards. But in this country of checkpoints, official and unofficial, a jinsiya can become a death warrant. If your name is Omar you're likely a Sunni Muslim, named after a seventh-century imam despised by Shiites. If you're Amar, pronounced almost the same, you could be from either sect. If you're Ali, you're probably Shiite. As a result, many Iraqis have started carrying two jinsiyas--a real one, and a fake linking them to the rival sect. (Iraqis typically know which to present, depending on whether the checkpoint is in a Sunni or Shiite neighborhood.) The demand for false ID cards has spiked as bodies pile up in the Baghdad morgue at the rate of 35 to 50 a day, frequently bound and blindfolded and showing signs of torture, a jinsiya in their shirt pocket. Shiites face danger from neighborhood gangs and insurgents, while Sunnis fear roving civilian death squads and checkpoints manned by the Iraqi Army or police, which are infiltrated by Shiite militiamen.
Forgery has a long tradition in Baghdad. Lovers used to buy marriage contracts so they could spend the night in a hotel together. Others procured driver's licenses or treated themselves to ...
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