It's tough enough for every civilian in Iraq but especially difficult for Iraq's Christian community, which runs a severe danger of extinction. So to have 2 of them killed by contractors for contractors for the US State Department is a new low. Not entirely surprisingly, there is a large scattered family of the woman who was driving the car (as an informal taxi), including in Belfast --
The woman, Marany Awanees, was the youngest of nine siblings in the Mamook family, including three brothers who are part of the Armenian diaspora in Europe and the United States. One brother is a computer programmer living in Glendale, Calif., near Los Angeles ...
“She was a lovely sister, my younger sister, a lovely, lovely sister,” another brother, Paul Mamook, an electrical engineer in Belfast, Northern Ireland, said in a telephone interview ... Paul Mamook said he called his sister after the Sept. 16 shooting by guards with Blackwater USA that killed as many as 17 people who were stuck in traffic near Nisour Square in Baghdad. The shooting struck fear in him, he said, because Ms. Awanees was a taxi driver. “I phoned her, and I said, ‘Whenever you drive, watch and check, and be very careful,’” he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “But I never expected it to happen to her.”
One wonders if the perilous state of Iraq's Christian community is one of the issues holding up Tony Blair's rumoured conversion to Catholicism.
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