Word: checkpoint
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...Kurdish region in northern Iraq, a pivotal staging point for any U.S. invasion, is an unsettling place at the best of times. Five bodies left sprawled on the road by a checkpoint on March 4 has made it even more so. Among the dead was Abullah Qasre, a leading figure in a local militant Islamic group known as Komal, one of the plethora of sectarian factions that riddle Kurdish politics. Komal, however, has come to be particularly important in recent months in light of the bloody war raging between ruling parties of Iraqi Kurdistan and Islamist groups linked with...
...suicide bomber used a Land Rover taxi that regularly plies the route between Halabja and the town of Sayyid Sadiq to help him cross from Ansar-held territory into the zone controlled by government forces. He detonated his charges when confronted by government troops at a roadside checkpoint, killing two soldiers, the taxi driver and himself. The attack coincided with a conference of Iraqi opposition organizations on a post-Saddam political order, attended by Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition. Though believed to have been simply coincidental, the timing was poignant: Khalizad had come...
...bomber, carrying a package of explosives and ball bearings strapped to his chest, was the sole passenger in the Land Rover taxi, sitting behind the driver and passing through a number of checkpoints. But when he neared Halabja, two wary soldiers had asked the passenger to produce his ID. Although local officials believe the bomber's intended target may have been the nearby military headquarters, once accosted by the government soldiers he knew he would get no further. Opening the left rear door, he stepped out with one hand in his pocket, a finger poised on the trigger mechanism. TIME...
...helium balloon, with Yasser Arafat's smiling face on it, floats over the checkpoint, where soldiers frantically debate whether to shoot it down. It sails past them into Jerusalem and alights on the Dome of the Rock--Ariel Sharon's favorite Muslim sanctuary...
...main plot is simple: two lovers live on opposite sides of al-Ram checkpoint; the man tries to be with the woman when he's not at his dying father's bedside. Since the man is played by Suleiman, 42, and his lover by his ex-lover, Palestinian journalist Manal Khader, and since Suleiman's father did die as he was writing the screenplay, this is clearly a kind of autobiographical satire. "Cinema is a form of striptease for me," says Suleiman. "I jot down very personal moments of everyday life when they tickle me. There is no message...