Word: basra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Southern Iraq, local tribal leaders have sorted out property disputes and murder cases for centuries without the help of police and courts. So when Sheik Mohammed al-Ebadi got a call from a British officer to help defuse a riot in Majar al-Kabir, northwest of Basra, he drove there, fast. As he approached the village, he saw British paratroopers engaged in a fierce fire fight with locals armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. The locals, enraged by reports of heavy-handed searches carried out by British troops, had attacked a patrol. When the fighting was done, four...
...mission is costing not only American treasure - currently an estimated $3 billion a month - but also American lives. U.S. forces come under attack every day in Iraq, and they have suffered combat casualties at a rate upward of one death every other day. Six British MPs were killed near Basra on Tuesday and eight were wounded in a second incident; a U.S. Marine was killed en route to help ambushed comrades Wednesday; two U.S. troops were reported missing overnight Thursday in Baghdad, and later in the day Centcom announced that a Special Operations soldier had been killed and eight wounded...
...awareness of Iraq's points of vulnerability, while Wednesday's firefights that killed six and wounded eight British troops mark an even more worrisome development. While attacks on U.S. forces had been mostly confined to the Sunni Baathist heartland, the Britons were attacked in the overwhelmingly Shiite region around Basra. It could be that such attacks were mounted by the same largely Sunni groups that are harassing U.S. forces in Baghdad and to the north - after all, Saddam's (mostly Sunni) Fedayeen were active as far south as Basra in the early days of the war. But if they were...
Sometimes they just got lucky: a 12-man Green Beret team in customized humvees came upon a Shi'ite cleric and several hundred of his anti-Saddam disciples near Basra on March 20, according to the team's intelligence officer. The cleric sheltered the U.S. troops and their vehicles in warehouses as they plotted joint maneuvers. The Americans deputized the locals and then passed out Chinese-made weapons to the cleric's men and led them on a number of successful raids, seizing more than 100 antitank missiles. When the same Green Berets couldn't dislodge a well-entrenched Iraqi...
...message doesn't appear to be getting through, although ORHA has some good stories to tell. In cities in the north, like Kirkuk, and the south, like Basra, conditions are much better than they are in Baghdad, in part because they are smaller and more manageable and in part because they are areas that were less sympathetic to Saddam and the Baath. There has been some progress in Baghdad too. Iraq's patchwork power grid last week managed to pump more than 1,000 MW of electricity into the city for the first time since the main fighting ended--though...