Word: basra
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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...
...satisfy domestic demand, let alone export to the world. As gas stations in Baghdad run out, a black market has sent prices skyrocketing. When the U.S. trucked in gas from Kuwait last week, prices began dropping. Refineries are limping along, largely because of a lack of electric power. The Basra refinery, Iraq's second largest, is running at less than half of capacity for another reason: lack of chemical additives for the leaded fuel that Iraq's cars still...
...house--and suddenly everything changed. The future is dark." Azed, the captain who ran from Suwayrah, sits in his uncle's house in Baghdad, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea. "What happened shocked everyone," he says. "We had heard about the resistance from the regular forces in Basra, and so we thought that surely the Republican Guard would be even tougher. But we never fought. I am ashamed of what happened," he says, waving a hand in front of his face as if to wipe away the memory. --With reporting by Brian Bennett/Baghdad, Jim Lacey/Hillah, Simon Robinson/Kut, Mark Thompson/Washington and Michael...
...Revealing some of the schisms even among supposedly Iranian-influenced Iraqi Shiites, Muqtada is disparaging of SCIRI's Hakim. "The followers of Sadr don't like Hakim because he betrayed the people of Basra and the south when he urged them to fight (in the 1991 anti-Saddam intifada), and didn't come in to help them, causing the intifada to fail...