Word: baghdads
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...operating, encouraging Iraqis to take the lead while promising that a dedicated U.S. military unit would be standing by if the Iraqis ran into trouble and needed U.S. help. "We've never been called as a quick-reaction force since we started doing this," Kelly said. But Kelly's Baghdad commanders were leery. "I had conversations with my bosses in Baghdad more than once [in which they maintained] there was a danger to reducing forces too quickly in Iraq," Kelly recalled. "But I'd make the point frequently that there's also a danger if you keep too many...
However, Iman, the woman sitting next to me, nervously pressed her face to the window and confessed that she was scared - not so much of the flight, she said, as just coming to Baghdad. She was Kuwaiti, she explained, and had not been to Baghdad in 20 years. She had come to sell a house she owned but had never lived in. "My husband said I must not go, but I must," she told me. "'Baba,' I said, 'It is in God's hands.'" She was particularly nervous because her friends in Baghdad had told her they could not meet...
...thought about this joke a few days later on my first plane ride into Baghdad International Airport. The descent, once famous for its harrowing, evasive corkscrew maneuver, was peaceful. We looped around the airport, above long rows of tan army tents at camps Liberty and Victory, delayed only by a small dust storm. In the row behind me, Iraqi gentlemen in blazers laughed the whole way. A few aisles up, a mountainous, tattooed contractor dozed in headphones...
...several checkpoints on the way that were manned by the Iraqi army and in one case by Ministry of the Interior forces. In each case, the guards waved us through. Above, a pair of Black Hawk helicopters crossed the sky. (See pictures of daily life returning to normal in Baghdad...
Whoever is in charge, the security situation is much improved. I do not hear explosions every morning, as reporters used to. But for all I have heard about improved security, no one I have met here acts as though Baghdad, outside the Green Zone, is really a secure place. There are still blast walls and precautions and nerves, though of course 6½ million people live here, as they must. Maybe the numbers speak for themselves. On Feb. 19, 2008, Iraqi Body Count, one of the several contentious projects to record violent civilian deaths, reported 37 dead. On the same...