Word: basra
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...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...
...Najaf, nobody disobeys a cleric. At first the soldiers refused to accept the prisoners. As the cleric negotiated with the Americans, the mob began to think again about the "Wahhabis." One man pulled out a pocketknife and headed for the two men, who claimed to have come from Basra to visit the grave of a relative. "Kill the Wahhabis!" the crowd shouted. "Slit their throats!" Finally, the Americans took charge. A group of soldiers quickly bundled the two men into a humvee and sped off. (On Saturday, U.S. military sources said the two men were still in custody, together with...
...case of the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad two weeks ago. Iraqis clung to the belief that no homegrown militant group would deliberately kill so many Iraqis. "Only foreigners like the Wahhabis would kill Shi'as without hesitation," said Ali al-Rubieh, a pilgrim visiting Najaf from Basra. "They don't regard us as Muslims, anyway." The White House and Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq, described the bombing as an act of terrorism, which has become shorthand for al-Qaeda. And in Najaf, reports circulated that the local police had arrested...
That view may be honestly held. In much of Iraq, life is slowly improving (though three British soldiers were killed in Basra on Saturday), and coalition forces continue to pick up leaders of Saddam's regime. Last week Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of chemical weapons in northern Iraq, was taken into custody. But honesty also requires a plain admission that the audacious attempt by the Bush Administration to pacify an arc of crisis that runs from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush has provoked many such desperate reactions by those opposed...