Word: abu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fall of Saddam Hussein, Adhamiya has turned into a safe haven for Sunni insurgents, earning the nickname "Baghdad's Fallujah." There's little love lost between Adhamiya and Sadr City, the giant Shi'ite slum whose residents made up the majority of the victims. At Adhamiya's ancient Abu Hanifa mosque, close to the Bridge of Imams, sermons routinely laud the jihadis who have been killing Shi'ite civilians and curse the Shi'ite-dominated government. Yet on Wednesday, the yellow-brick mosque became a makeshift triage station for emergency crews and a lost-and-found center for pilgrims separated...
...Alas, the cessation of sectarian hostilities was too good to last. A day after the tragedy, a brief gun battle broke out between Iraqi security forces on the bridge and some Sunni insurgents in Adhamiya. And al-Qaeda's Iraqi offshoot, led by Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, claimed credit for an earlier rocket attack on Kadhimiya, the Shi'ite district on the other side of the bridge. Drive-by shootings at Sunni mosques in southern Iraq last Friday suggested scapegoating by some Shi'ites. And calls for a peace march after the joint prayers in Baghdad proved futile: not enough...
...Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, was rumored to be gravely injured or dead just a few months ago. Since then, his organization is believed to have been behind barbaric attacks in Iraq and has even claimed responsibility for a failed rocket assault on a U.S. ship in the Red Sea. It's hard to separate the man from the mythology, but recent European intelligence reports reviewed by TIME suggest that al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda franchise is expanding far beyond Iraq and that he now rivals Osama bin Laden in influence among Middle Eastern and European...
European officials say the reports are based in part on U.S. officials' interrogation of suspected al-Qaeda deputy Abu Faraj al-Libbi, captured last May in Pakistan. (The CIA declined to comment.) Al-Zarqawi has written to al-Libbi about setting up camps in Jordan, Turkey, Syria or Lebanon, European officials say. He hoped the camps would provide instruction in European languages to facilitate jihadi attacks in Iraq and Europe...
...Sharq al-Awsat, the Arabic international daily, complained about Penguin paperback books 70th anniversary publication of excerpts from Gustave Flaubert's letters from Egypt. The article's author, Susan Bashir, complained about the provocative new title, "The Desert and the Dancing Girls" and the cover's "half naked girls." Abu Aardvark echoed Bashir: "Is this what Penguin thinks the Arab world really is...empty deserts and exotic dancing girls?" Meanwhile, as the genre's 51 million readers pump gas this summer, will they be dreaming of oil sheikhs in exotic kingdoms or eternal supplies of fuel in the arms...