Word: basra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...thing people aren't doing is leaving. Basrans know that the army would not allow a mass exodus. And besides, where would people go? "During the war with Iran, people sent their children to the north, away from the front lines," says Abdul-Razak Mohamed, vice president of Basra University. "But now no place is safe from American bombs...
...when American bombs struck the office compound of an oil company in the center of town, killing four civilians and wounding 27 others, according to official Iraqi figures. The Pentagon says its forces were responding to Iraqi fire. "Bush has enough rockets to hit every home in Basra," says a homemaker who lives next to the compound. "Why should we bother to stock up food when we're all going to be dead soon...
...many other ways too, Basra is the anti-Baghdad. It is a sleepy, haphazard sprawl, short on Saddam's favored monumental architecture--and, in fact, on Saddam himself. There are entire streets in Basra without a single depiction of the dictator. Basra's most notable statues are not of Saddam but of such historic figures as the poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and the philologist Al-Khalili bin Ahmed al-Farahidi and of "martyrs" from earlier battles. The most poignant of Iraq's countless memorials is on the corniche along the Shatt al Arab: 100 bronze statues of war heroes...
...statues point east, but the next war would come to Basra from the south, the scene of Iraq's humiliation in 1991, when U.S.-led forces drove the Iraqi military from Kuwait. A sand barrier and trench constructed by Kuwait after the Gulf War to prevent infiltrators from crossing over now separates Iraq from Kuwait, and beyond it are the massing ranks of the invasion force. As he peers into the distance in the midday haze, vegetable farmer Shadat Dafeh Hamed mumbles, "I can't see them, but I know they are there." Hamed, 70, lives closer to the enemy...
...were not unrespectful, he recalls: "They never entered my home." But they ordered out all the adult males and trucked them to a prison camp in Saudi Arabia, he says. Hamed was spared because of his age, and his sons escaped the punishment because they were all away, in Basra. Hamed says it was five months before the young men of Khardeh returned. In the meantime, the womenfolk and old men had to tend the crops and collect the harvest. "It was a terrible, terrible time," Hamed says, squatting on a carpet in his furnitureless living room. "It's because...