Word: baghdad
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...Baghdad-connected highways that run through Madain make the area a natural transit point for the bombers that sow mayhem in the capital. A preferred insurgent tactic for evading detection is to construct car bombs and IEDs as close as possible to their target in or around Baghdad...
...dusty farming communities southeast of Baghdad have become a key front in U.S. efforts to pacify the Iraqi capital. As militants search for sanctuaries from which they can stage attacks in the city, American troops are looking for ways to block an elusive enemy. As tens of thousands of additional American soldiers began patrolling Baghdad this summer, Madain, to the southeast of the capital, was an obvious fallback position for Sunni and Shi'ite militants. Until this spring, the U.S. presence there had consisted of only a couple of companies that patrolled in Humvees, but a brigade was assigned...
...says Col. Wayne Grigsby, commander of U.S. forces in the area. Now several thousand Americans are spread across several combat outposts, and they patrol Madain for hours each day. Grigsby's men are confronting enemies whose diversity and ingenuity reflect the variety of armed groups that have proliferated in Baghdad since 2003. Their main focus, says Grigsby, is preventing militants and their weapons from entering the capital...
...commander believes his brigade is succeeding in limiting the number of bombs entering Baghdad. But he's unsure whether the bomb-makers live in the area or are brought in to construct the devices. "If I had that answer, man, I'd go out and whack 'em right now," Grigsby says...
Speaking to TIME in Baghdad, Khateeb offers a number of grim statistics showing that Iraq is quickly becoming a disaster zone comparable to places like Somalia. Violence in recent years has left roughly 3 million women widows and created about 5 million orphans, she said. Unemployment for much of the country is as high as 60%. Tent cities are springing up in Baghdad to house the estimated 2 million internally displaced people adrift in Iraq...