'all about words'

At the same time, a new bit of Arabic began slipping into the chatter of ordinary Iraqis: "allas." Literally, "one who chews." The word had come to denote an Iraqi who led a group of killers to their victim, a denouncer of sorts. Typically, the allas pointed out the Shiites living in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood for the gunmen who were hunting them.

"The allas is from the neighborhood, and he had a mask on," Haider Mohammed, a Shiite from Abu Ghraib, told me. "He pointed to my uncle." So the gunman chased his uncle, Hussein Khalil, who had been driving in his Daewoo sedan. The gunmen ran Khalil off the road and shot him twice in the back of the head. Mohammed found his uncle facedown in a garbage dump.

Allas came into use during the summer of 2005, at the same time that Iraq's leaders were gathering in the Green Zone to write the country's new constitution. The constitution, of course, was all about words: "Islam," "federalism," "nation." Words that empowered nobody, restrained no one. All the while, outside the Green Zone, men with masks were busy pointing, creating whole new vocabularies of their own.

—Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (2008)