1. Not being white or Western:

Like most of the rest of the world, it seems that ISIS is obsessed with whiteness, whether it’s the crazy Belgian guy who loves to wave the black flag and scream out the few Arabic phrases he knows, to any of the straggly bearded recruits who have shown up from this or that part of Europe: whiteness rules.

The white fighters get the most face time before the media, the nicest places to live, the easiest jobs.

If you’re not actually white yourself, it helps if you come from a white country, like the UK or France; speaking a western language and being from a mostly white land makes you almost white on the ISIS scale, a candidate for leadership and representation and much boasting.

If you’re brown or black and from a country like Pakistan or Egypt or Somalia your job in ISIS is to dig trenches, clean up the muck and lurk around in the sidelines.

2. A passport that can pass no ports:

Coming from a poor country like Pakistan or Afghanistan, whose official passport doesn’t really get you many places at all, you were excited at the prospect of burning this passport and getting a new one; any passport, you figured, must be more useful than the one you had.

You were wrong.

Beyond the nifty black cover and the ancient looking Arabic lettering, the passport isn’t worth anything at all. After you and some fellows from other brown countries burned yours up, a man just handed everyone blank and black passport books and asked that they fill out their names and details themselves.