Word: basra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mostly stayed out of the fighting, preferring to let the Iraqi government and Iraqi troops take the lead. Bergner would not comment on whether the Americans would become involved more directly if the Iraqi government could not complete its Basra operation. "I would say," he said, "that's a very hypothetical question at this time...
Thursday also marked the third day of escalated fighting in other sections of the city, spurred by the launch of an Iraqi military operation against armed militants - many of them supporters of powerful Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr - in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites massed in three districts of Baghdad, including Sadr City - the notoriously dangerous slum and stronghold of Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army - to protest the offensive in Basra. One group of demonstrators in Khadamiya district carried a coffin with a photo of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's face...
...Maliki's office confirmed that the Iraqi government has given residents of Basra until April 8 to turn over "heavy and medium-size weapons" in return for a reward. Government adviser Sadiq al-Rikabi said the deadline is separate from a three-day ultimatum for gunmen in the southern town to surrender their arms and renounce violence or face harsher measures. That expires later Friday...
News from the south of Iraq was no less grim. In Basra, Iraqi forces pressed their three-day offensive against what both Iraqi and Coalition forces continue to call "criminal elements." Spokesmen for Moqtada al-Sadr have openly denounced the military campaign and called for the immediate withdrawal of Iraqi forces. In what is widely regarded as an effort to maintain the precarious ceasefire renewed by Sadr in February, both coalition forces and the Iraqi military have carefully avoided referring to the armed fighters as Sadr's supporters, but rather as unaffiliated criminals and thugs. "The operation in Basra...
Meanwhile, Maliki traveled to Basra on Monday in a show of force against the "criminals." He has given the armed fighters 72 hours to surrender their weapons, a deadline that runs out this weekend. In the Green Zone in Baghdad, Senior British Military Representative Lieutenant Colonel Michael Shearer told TIME that the Iraqi operation is aimed at quelling criminal activity, and that the city has never been under the "control" of militant groups...