Word: basra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...failed to prepare adequately for the timely import and distribution of half a million tons of fertilizer, according to a former U.S. Department of Agriculture adviser to the CPA. Now, ramshackle vehicles that are supposed to be rushing the fertilizer from Jordan and the southern port city of Basra are stalling on Iraq's rutted, cratered roads. What's at stake is more than just another failed growing season's crops, which include maize, wheat and barley. Agriculture is Iraq's second largest economic sector and largest employer. If farmers have no work, that might fuel recruitment into the ranks...
...dock of Abu Fulus port, 20 miles south of Basra, Bassem Saghair deftly works the controls of a crane as he unloads air-conditioning units from the hold of the Hussaini. The ship is one of a dozen crowding the waterfront that have sailed from Dubai up the Shatt al-Arab River laden with consumer goods. Saghair, 15, quit school for this job, which pays $360 a month, double the highest salary any Iraqi official earns from U.S.-occupation authorities. "Life is not bad," says Saghair, with a shy smile spreading under the beginnings of a mustache...
...used during Saddam Hussein's regime, but with U.N. sanctions against Iraq lifted and all import and customs controls unenforced, the port has become an unofficial entry point for used cars, electronics, clothes and food. There are no government officials here and no British soldiers from the garrison in Basra. Merchants walk up and down the dock, shouting purchase orders into satellite phones as young men in jeans with AK-47s guard against pirates who prowl the river in motorboats. As in the American frontier a century ago, fortunes are being made almost overnight in Iraq, and with the same...
...learned it will have to do without help from Iraq's northern neighbor when Turkey announced it would not send troop reinforcements. The International Committee of the Red Cross also stepped back, announcing the temporary closure of its offices in Baghdad and the southern city of Basra amid security fears. Six U.S. soldiers were killed when a Black Hawk helicopter was downed, apparently by a rocket-propelled grenade, near Tikrit on Friday, mirroring the felling of a Chinook helicopter near Fallujah at the start of the week that killed 16. Poland suffered its first combat loss in Iraq when...
...stir up a confrontation with his supporters. But the radicals are clearly staking out their turf as the political day of reckoning approaches, and were involved in violent clashes with supporters of the moderate clerics at Najaf on Tuesday. A series of roadside bomb attack on British forces in Basra in recent days also suggests an emerging Shiite militancy...