Word: bedouins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Bedouin do not have many riches, and sheep and camel herds account for what they do have. Even by Bedouin standards the people I saw are impoverished. Of the hundred family groupings we passed by, I did not see one flock of sheep with more than 20 animals, and even those small flocks usually had six shepherds watching over them...
...When I passed my first Bedouin family I thought of them as noble, living a lifestyle virtually unchanged since the fall of Babylon. However, the sight of young children at the side of the road begging for MRE's (the U.S. military's "meals ready to eat," which most Americans would consider barely edible) made me look a bit harder at what I was seeing. It occurred to me that this was not just an activity the kids thought would be fun. Rather, it had all of the appearances of an organized effort...
...flat, parched sands of northern Kuwait have grown crowded in the past few weeks. Normally the desert plains are dotted with oilworkers and the occasional weekend tent of a Kuwaiti city dweller connecting with his Bedouin roots. But now the country's northern half is a restricted military zone crammed with more than 100,000 U.S. and British troops. Makeshift firing ranges are double-booked. Patrols practicing forays into Iraqi wastelands bump into one another where their perimeters overlap. When troops from the 101st Airborne Division arrived last week, soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division had to move camp back...
...Fuad al-Afghani, a souvenir seller in Amman, made a fortune on Saddam's popularity. He reckons he sold 50,000 items, such as Saddam wristwatches and Scud lapel pins. Last week, as he stood in a shop brimming with copper trays and Bedouin rugs, al-Afghani said he would not be touting Saddam trinkets this time around, not with Jordan's government frowning on the Iraqi President. Al-Afghani still admires the man, but he figures, "Why give myself a headache?" It's the kind of sentiment that signals a romance is breaking up. --With reporting by Amany Radwan/Cairo...
...Iraq's side there is no deployment at all to protect this precious region which floats on a sea of oil, the key to Iraq's treasury. A few trenches have been dug through the desert, where sheep amble peacefully under the watchful eye of haughty Bedouin women. There are some soldiers, but hardly enough to defend the crucial oil fields that burn brightly on the horizon. Along the highway from Basra to Baghdad, the army posts have been freshly whitewashed but are poorly fortified: the walls are low and there are just three men with a machine...