Word: basra
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Christopher Morris and Anthony Suau knew they were in trouble when the Republican Guards stopped them at a shattered bridge on the outskirts of Basra. The two photographers, who were working for TIME, were headed for the Iraqi city to cover the fighting between government troops and insurgents in the wake of the gulf war. But the guardsmen seized Morris and Suau and more than 25 other journalists on March 3, a Sunday, and ransacked their cars. "It was as if we had walked into a den of 40 thieves," said Suau, 34. "Everything disappeared very quickly...
...next six days, the group's captors shuttled the journalists from one site to another while deciding what to do with them, and the world wondered where they were. The first stop was Basra University, which was surrounded by tanks and artillery and swarming with Iraqi troops. Soldiers herded all the hostages into a small room furnished with two beds and half a dozen broken television sets. The weary journalists spent the night without food, water or much sleep, as rifle fire barked outside their windows and artillery rockets screamed overhead...
...privates in the Iraqi army, was to know the story of their country last week. A bag of spoiled dates -- "food for cattle," Hussein called it -- was their only sustenance as they plodded down a rain-sodden highway littered with ravaged tanks in southern Iraq. They had come from Basra, where a popular uprising against Saddam Hussein's government was under way. At one point in the fighting, Jabar and Hussein shed their uniforms and joined the revolt, but they grew fainthearted when loyalist troops began shelling rebel positions. "We are for the people," said Jabar, "but if we desert...
...height of the fighting for Basra, Western intelligence officials say, some 5,000 defectors from the regular army, angered that their leaders had brought them such inglorious defeat, faced 6,000 loyalists from the Republican Guard. The rabble-rousers also included a large number of Shi'ite fundamentalists, some of whom paraded portraits of Mohammed Bakr Hakim, Iraq's leading Shi'ite cleric. Hakim lives in exile in Iran and aims to install a Tehran-like revolutionary government in Baghdad; Iran's President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani last week called on Saddam's regime to "surrender to the will...
Ambitious travelers journey about 30 miles toward Basra to see the remains of a convoy of fleeing Iraqi vehicles destroyed by allied aircraft. At the Iraqi border last week, tragedy was replaced by joy. Several thousand Kuwaitis were kidnapped by Iraqi soldiers in the last days of the occupation; last Friday Baghdad suddenly released about 1,175, transporting them back to Kuwait City in trucks bearing the seal of the Republican Guard. Most had been held at a military barrack near Basra, squeezed in so tight that they were forced to take turns sleeping. For the first three days, they...