Word: afar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...troops call it Route Barracuda, a patch of terrorist territory in the northern Iraqi town of Tall 'Afar, where thousands of U.S. and Iraqi forces have converged for the biggest battle in nearly a year. On this sweaty September afternoon, the neighborhood is living up to its name. A squad of U.S. commandos enters an abandoned house and clambers up to the roof. The 2-foot lip doesn't give much cover from the bullets raining down on them from insurgent gunmen firing from a building 200 yards to the north. Rounds flying at supersonic speed crack inches from...
...offensive in Tall 'Afar, which wound down last week, was this year's Fallujah--a mass assault involving 7,000 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers and hundreds of Bradleys, battle tanks, artillery pieces, all combined with AC-130 Spectre gunships, F-16 fighter jets and attack helicopters. Unlike the Fallujah battle, Tall 'Afar raged mostly unseen, with accounts of the fighting limited largely to the reports of U.S. and Iraqi officials in Baghdad, who declared that the onslaught had succeeded in driving out the bands of rebels--local units commanded by al-Qaeda kingpin Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi--from their latest...
...itself without compounding the damage done to U.S. interests in the region? After a month in the al-Qaeda-dominated Syrian border region, TIME spent 10 days on the front lines of the war, having lived with U.S. and Iraqi troops as they prepared for the battle of Tall 'Afar, one of al-Zarqawi's biggest strongholds and, intelligence officers say, a place where he was detected in recent weeks. Waiting for the Americans were hundreds of hardened local fighters, small bands of foreign zealots and, in the notorious Sarai quarter of the city, a labyrinth of medieval alleyways laced...
Nestled close to Syria, Tall 'Afar is at the center of a vast border region rife with smuggling and anti-American sentiment. After the U.S. invasion, it became a gateway for foreign fighters entering Iraq. In time, homegrown insurgent cells came under the control of al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia organization, which transformed the city into a training and command base for foreign jihadis and a hideout for al-Zarqawi and his deputies. After the fall of Fallujah, the town became a propaganda tool for the resistance, with attacks on U.S. forces in the city featured heavily...
Although U.S. officers had known for months about the atrocities taking place in Tall 'Afar, they were powerless to do anything about them. Stretched thin fighting rebels in places like al-Qaim and Mosul, the military dedicated just a single infantry battalion to an area twice the size of Connecticut. In May, however, more than 4,000 troops of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, a unit with a unique combination of tanks, Bradleys and helicopters that is back for its second tour in Iraq, were hastily rerouted from the south to the Tall 'Afar region, where they began disrupting...