Word: abu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fitting that Saddam Hussein died, as many of his political opponents did, dangling from the end of a rope. He had used the gallows at Abu Ghraib to silence opposition and dissent. In doing so, he had controlled Iraq for over two decades, but he created a generation of enemies. And some of those enemies, who never forgot their fathers and brothers who disappeared in the night, were there to watch...
...months before the start of the war, I visited a small village on the Iraqi border with Kuwait. The local elder, a spry septuagenarian known as Abu Mohammed, was keenly aware that when the fighting began, his small watermelon farm might be the first piece of Iraqi territory trampled by American tanks. As he cleaned his ancient AK-47, Abu Mohammed admitted that it would be no defense against the world's most powerful military machine. When I asked if he was frightened, he nodded, saying, "Not of the Americans, but of Saddam. If I don't stand and fight...
...hard to overstate how much Saddam Hussein dominated Iraq, physically and psychologically. His statues and portraits were everywhere, but his subjects really needed no reminders of the dictator's presence: as Abu Mohammed indicated to me, Iraqis carried Saddam in their head, like a psychosomatic condition...
...next time I met Abu Mohammed, in the summer of 2004, he had come to Baghdad with a group of tribal sheikhs to seek patronage from the new Iraqi government. It was a few days after Saddam had been brought to court for the first time, and Iraqis were still absorbing the prospect that justice would be done upon their former tormentor. When I asked Abu Mohammed if Saddam was still in his head, he told me a story about one of his sons, who had a leg blown off by a landmine during Saddam's first folly, the eight...
...bandits. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, Sittar is said to have made a fortune by nabbing cars moving along the unguarded roads of Anbar Province. As the insurgency began to take shape in Anbar Province in 2003, Sittar extended help to al-Qaeda in Iraq, then led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A former al Qaeda fighter who spoke to TIME on condition of anonymity says Sittar offered the group cars, safe houses and local guides for the foreign volunteers. But that partnership was short-lived. When insurgents began raiding the highways as a means of fundraising, Sittar...