Word: basra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...supremacy among the Shi'ites. Shi'ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki recently called for amendments to Iraq's constitution to strengthen the central government's power at the expense of the country's 18 provinces. This week, Maliki's rivals in the southern Shi'ite bastion of Basra submitted a petition demanding a referendum in the oil-soaked province aimed to turning it into a semi-autonomous federal region akin to Kurdistan...
...Obama received his first on-the-ground briefing in Iraq on the morning of July 21 at a military base adjacent to the Basra airport. During the briefing, said a senior U.S. military official, then-Senator Obama seemed "receptive" and "asked good questions." The hope among senior officers in Iraq is that President-elect Obama will make good on another promise he's made over an over again from the stump: "We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting...
...occasionally die--on a cavernous expanse of stage nearly half a football field wide. In their dress-up uniforms, they're an exotic-looking bunch: wearing kilts, playing bagpipes, sporting tam-o'-shanters with a red feather. This Scottish army regiment seems out of place in Iraq, transferred from Basra to bolster U.S. troops bogged down in the "triangle of death" near Baghdad. But their plainspoken, Highland-accented gripes about the war have a familiar ring. "You're no' really doing the job you're trained for," says one soldier. "You're no' defending your country. We're invading their...
...stop in Amarah, capital of the restless border province of Maysan--the trip at times was undeniably tense. Our nerves frayed when traffic jams caused by U.S. military convoys brought us to hour-long standstills, and when an anonymous group of men pulled up to the gates of our Basra hotel late at night--journalists have been kidnapped from hotels in Basra...
Iraq Journal For a video of TIME's Basra road trip, visit time.com/roadtrip