Word: basra
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...Arabs praying for the best, the story of the previous Western invasion of Iraq offers them little comfort. British forces seized Basra and then Baghdad from the Ottoman Empire in World War I, later forming the modern state out of three unconnected provinces inhabited by Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. Iraqi nationalists quickly became disillusioned with their new, Western masters. The Revolution of 1920 left hundreds of British casualties. The British, America's main ally in this latest invasion, managed to implant a friendly monarchy. But the Hashemites were finally overthrown in a coup d'etat...
...southern Iraq, however, reconnaissance on the key city of Basra is proving difficult. Overhead surveillance can help identify targets and track large weapons and troop movements. "We know where everything is," the Western diplomat asserts. But Special Forces Groups face a much harder task, forging local alliances and even gauging what the mood is on the ground. "Southern Iraq is an intelligence black hole," says a senior British military source, noting that Marine assault units will be guided into the area by Iraqi exiles, some of whom haven't been inside their native land for a decade...
...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...