Word: baqubah
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...dinner party had gathered last Wednesday evening in a farmhouse in the fertile, fruit-growing countryside just outside Baqubah, 30 miles north of Baghdad. One of the attendees was Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. With him were at least three women and three men, including Sheik Abdul-Rahman, al-Zarqawi's so-called spiritual adviser and confidant. Also in the house was one of al-Zarqawi's most trusted couriers, an aide tasked with relaying messages from the commander to militants in the field. What al-Zarqawi could not have known was that...
...Qaeda boss. The official says that one informant, described as neither Jordanian nor Iraqi, made contact with three of al-Zarqawi's couriers, all of whom the Jordanians referred to as Mr. X. According to the official, the informant reported spotting one Mr. X in an area outside Baqubah last week. "Mr. X went to Baqubah, so we knew Zarqawi went there," says the official...
...operatives gave the special-ops task force a tantalizing lead. For nearly a month, the commandos had monitored every move of Abdul-Rahman, the spiritual adviser, whose locations had been revealed by an al-Qaeda operative captured in May near the Iraq-Jordan border. When Abdul-Rahman surfaced near Baqubah last week--apparently in the same location as the Jordanians' Mr. X--the commandos moved in for the kill. "We had absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Zarqawi was in the house," Army Major General William Caldwell told reporters in Baghdad the day after the strike. The Jordanian security official told...
...officials now concede that the insurgency is far larger than they first imagined, and it is growing both in numbers of fighters and also in the range and boldness of their attacks. And they acknowledge that whole towns in Sunni heartland, such as Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi and Baqubah have been turned by insurgents into no-go areas for coalition forces. One measure of the depth of the security crisis in Iraq is the Bush administration's plan to spend money earmarked for reconstruction instead on urgent security priorities...
...face-offs may have wider reverberations. Two months after sovereignty was handed over to Iraqis, large swaths of the country are controlled by a flourishing assortment of insurgents. U.S. forces have abdicated power in Fallujah, been chased out of Ramadi and Samarra, and are scrambling to keep hold of Baqubah, Tikrit and Mosul. Even in Baghdad, gunmen have turned areas of the capital into deadly no-go zones. While U.S. and Iraqi officials insist they have the firepower to contain the violence, the agonizing search for a way out in Najaf was the latest reminder that military might...