implicated in the 1997 killing of an African immigrant at a Denver bus stop. One of its members, Nathan Thill, pleaded guilty to murder and said at his sentencing that the immigrant was wearing an "enemy uniform," which Potok said was understood to mean black skin.

The gang is believed to have several hundred to 1,000 members, most of them in Colorado prisons. It gets its name from a section of the California penal code that deals with robbery. Potok said it wasn't clear why the gang was named for that section.

"The bulk of it is still inside the prisons, but increasingly they're spilling out onto the streets," he said. "A lot of drug-running, weapons trafficking, other crimes. They're well-known for the harshness of the discipline on members —In 2012, the Syrian civil war reached the suburbs of Damascus. Army tanks rolled over anti-government protesters in Ghouta; artillery shells fell on Darayya. One morning that May, a car bomb exploded in the town of Jdeidet Artouz, southwest of the capital. The blast jolted Ghaith, a twenty-two-year-old law student, out of bed. He lived in a two-bedroom apartment with his mother; his father had died when he was an infant, and his siblings—four sisters and a brother, all older—had left the house after getting married. Ghaith stepped to the window and pulled back the curtain. Across the street, a sedan was spewing flames. Body parts littered the road.

The victim was Ghaith’s neighbor, an Alawite man whom rebels had apparently targeted for assassination. In the weeks that followed,