Word: baghdad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Wednesday's enormous, killer blasts shattered more than ministry buildings in Baghdad. It also tore the tenuous hope that the country had come to a workable calm. The emerging details of the plot only infuriated a populace already outraged at a government that seems to have lost control of a security situation so soon after crowing nationalistically that it was back in charge as U.S. troops began their withdrawal...
...just two years ago, even if there really wasn't any calm. The air was full of sandstorms and anticipation. The village-crushing bombs outside Mosul were disturbing but not daily occurrences. Then roadside bombs started injuring civilians again, and reports started accumulating of more and more shooting. In Baghdad, the bombs started getting bigger. And then on Wednesday, a series of explosions rocked the capital, including an enormous explosion in front of the Foreign Ministry, which lies close to the Green Zone. Shattered glass and concrete littered the area...
...bomb at the Foreign Ministry and nearly 200 injured. Another 28 were killed and 96 injured by a truck bomb near the Finance Ministry. Meanwhile, two consecutive roadside bombs injured 10 on Palestine Street, and a third roadside bomb injured three in a mostly Shi'ite area of western Baghdad. Mortars lobbed into central Baghdad injured four in a Sunni area and two in a mixed area. (See pictures of the U.S. troops' six years in Iraq...
...Nouri al-Maliki this week approved a referendum on the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). If approved by parliament, it would be on the same ballot as candidates in the parliamentary elections set for January. SOFA has thus far reduced U.S. control over key areas - such as Baghdad's Green Zone - and prohibited U.S. forces from entering Iraqi cities in most circumstances. President Barack Obama has pledged to withdraw U.S. forces by December 2011. But if Iraqis vote down the agreement, U.S. troops will be out by January 2011. (Read about Iraq's bombs of August...
...hour days digging foxholes under a sweltering sun in full battle gear, his discomfort augmented by body armor and a Kevlar helmet. The late Sergeant Santos Cardona was sentenced to 90 days' hard labor at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 2006 for his involvement in prisoner mistreatment at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, where he worked as a dog handler. Though prisoners picked cotton and repaired railroads after the Civil War, restrictions imposed in the 1920s and '30s have curtailed prison labor. These days, prisoners' jobs are more likely to consist of making license plates or doing laundry. Not exactly fulfilling...