Word: cordone
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...Several hours after Reinado arrived in Same, Australian troops set up a cordon of checkpoints and roadblocks around his hilltop compound. Helicopters buzzed over the town and armored personnel carriers rumbled up the roads. "They were blocking the people," says Patricino dos Reis, a resident who sympathizes with Reinado. "It shocked us that they would carry out an operation while all the people were still in the town." Reinado told journalists he would fight to the death. "If you bring all the forces and point guns at me," he warned, "I will shoot you." Gusmao and the commander...
...Iraqi army in the capital is ill equipped and undisciplined, and many Iraqi army units hardly hide their sectarianism. That means the task of pacifying Sadr City may fall to U.S. troops. Under the Army's Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) doctrine, squads of troops would cordon off blocks of Baghdad and warily permeate them, shooting anyone who threatened them. Once a block had been sealed and secured, a protective force would remain there while troops moved on to the next...
...troops. Perhaps the most visible example of this came in October, when U.S. forces threw up a temporary blockade around the Shi'a slum of Sadr City, home to the Mahdi Army militia blamed for much of the sectarian killings around Baghdad. During the days when the Sadr City cordon was in place, Baghdad saw noticeably fewer murders. The episode revealed two important things. First, U.S. forces can ratchet down the killings in Baghdad, at least for a time, with basic tactics like roadblocks and military policing. And second, as of now, the militias so eager to kill civilians...
...police as starting it. I could never prove it. But the bottom line was--whether it was true or false--the people did not trust the national police." In early October the Americans created what they called an isolation zone, ordering all police out of Mekanik. Before the U.S. cordon went into effect, there had been up to eight murders a day in the district of 50,000 inhabitants, and Sunni mosques were frequently attacked by Shi'ite gunmen. The Army says that as soon as the police left, Mekanik's murder rate dropped about 60%, and the mosque attacks...
...tilted in favor of the Sunnis. Mindful of Shi'ite objections, Maliki is moving slowly, and that is deepening the alienation of even those Sunnis closest to the political process. Tariq al-Hashimi, the Sunni Vice President of Iraq, for example, condemned Maliki's intervention to lift the security cordon around Sadr City, warning that this would ease the movement of Shi'ite death squads around Baghdad...