Everyone who’s been to Iraq knows the extent Iraqi translators for the U.S. go to safeguard their identities. Ski masks, wraparound sunglasses, gloves in the heat. If the insurgents or the militias or the death squads find out who they are, they and their families will very likely be kidnapped and murdered as collaborators, even today. About a week ago, I learned that Iraqi employees of the company that contracts with the U.S. military to provide Iraqi linguists have been warned of tax-filing changes — a consequence of the Status of Forces Agreement — that they fear could deliver their identities to the Iraqi government, which is composed of parties with ties to militias and contains people who wouldn’t have any qualms about selling someone’s life away to an insurgent group or criminal gang. In the Washington Independent today is a story about an unintended consequence of the SOFA.

Several weeks ago, Global Linguist Solutions (GLS), the company that holds the contract with the U.S. military to provide translators, entered into negotiations with the Iraqi government about what their new obligations are for withholding employee taxes once the U.S.-Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) — which, among other things, gives the Iraqi government increased authority over U.S. contractors — goes into effect. The company said emphatically that it has no intention of turning over identifying information for its roughly 7,000 Iraqi employees. “We’re not providing any personal identification information,” said company spokesman Douglas Ebner. “We have not done so up to now, and we’re not going to change.”

But many of these contractors don’t trust GLS to keep its word. Some are considering fleeing Iraq entirely, raising the prospect of U.S. service members losing their ability to talk and listen to Iraqis. “We either quit,” said Garrison, the pseudonym of an Iraqi interpreter, in an email, “or sign our own death warrants by turning the information [over] to the ministry.”