Word: anbar
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...different in Anbar province, where the presence of American troops on the streets of places like Ramadi actually prompts violence rather than heading it off. Insurgents and fighters from al-Qaeda in Iraq regularly strike U.S. forces in Anbar with small arms, massive roadside bombs and mortars that carry blasts comparable to heavy artillery. Militants come to the area from surrounding countries and elsewhere in Iraq specifically for a chance to confront U.S. troops, which is part of the reason the insurgency persists. It's a dilemma familiar to counterinsurgency strategists: much of the fighting in Ramadi and other places...
There wasn't much blood on the last casualty of the day in Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar Province. The bandages on the face of the American soldier who arrived at the U.S. field hospital in the area around midnight Dec. 6 were only a little red as medics crowded around him at the operating table. Navy Commander Carlos Brown, the chief surgeon at Camp Ramadi, peered at the bullet wound in the soldier's lower face as his team quickly cut clothes off the man and readied surgical equipment. "Stop," Brown said suddenly. All hands fell away from...
...Across Iraq that day, 11 American servicemen died in one of the deadliest 24-hour periods for U.S. troops in the country this year. Four of the dead appeared in Brown's hospital in the heart of Anbar Province, where U.S. troops are killed in greater numbers than anywhere else in Iraq. Since June, the U.S. effort to quell sectarian violence in Baghdad has drawn thousands of troops to the country's capital, where the world's attention remains largely focused. But outside of Baghdad, U.S. forces are suffering the heaviest death toll these days as they continue to wage...
...report paints a far grimmer picture of Iraq than Bush has been willing to admit, and it repudiates many of his notions about what's sustaining the violence. Forty percent of Iraq's population of 26 million now lives in the "highly insecure" provinces of Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala and Salah ad Din. Bush blames the increasing violence on al-Qaeda, but the report notes that that the terror group is now responsible for only a "small portion" of it. The sectarian violence between Shi'a and Sunnis in and around Baghdad "causes the largest number of civilian casualties. Iraq...
With the U.S. gone, the intensified fighting would probably be internecine as well as sectarian. Shi'ite militias in the south have shown a propensity to fight one another, as have Sunni groups in the volatile Anbar province. Iraq could look very much like Afghanistan after the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops--sectarian or ethnic warlords battling for territory, with the backing of sponsors from neighboring countries. An Afghanistan-style civil war would provide international terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and Hizballah with fertile ground in which to recruit, train and battle-test a new generation of global jihadis...