Word: deserting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Successors to the leftist People's Mujahedin, which helped overthrow Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the soldiers of the rebel force are bivouacked in five camps in the barren salt desert of Iraq, just out of range of Iranian artillery. Critics call them pawns of the Iraqis, who are said to have given the resisters money and arms in addition to a generous swath of desert land. They also say Rajavi hardly represents a democratic alternative to the current regime...
...Germans' anger could only give heart to the N.L.A., whose desert battalions have been poised to make war against the fundamentalist government since 1988. The army's finest moment came in 1991, when it successfully fought off a large-scale incursion by a force of elite Revolutionary Guards. The N.L.A.'s officers claim they have launched more than 100 cross-border operations against Iran in the past several years. The Iranians have responded with terrorist strikes, Scud missiles and, in January, a mortar assault on the N.L.A.'s fortified compound in downtown Baghdad, causing minor damage...
...join Rajavi's warriors. Her face and hands stained black from cleaning her Russian T-55 tank's gun barrel, Nasferi slips into the small driver's hatch beneath the turret of the tank, which jumps as she jams it into gear and guides it easily across the desert. In Washington, where she lived from 1977 to 1989, "I had my own house, a car and a job, but I kept listening to reports of how bad things were in my country," she says. So she decided she had to go home...
...blaze, in this case the stampede that broke out as the flames spread. The fire broke out as the more than two million Muslims making the pilgrimage entered one of the crucial stages of the Haj: the eighth day, when pilgrims must spend the night camping on the desert plain of Mina outside Mecca. The incident is another in a series of embarrassments for a Saudi government that has increasingly staked its legitimacy on its role as the guardian of the Holy Places. "King Fahd now carries the title 'Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,' an important element of legitimacy...
...winds and rains. These memories are encrypted in dust particles, rare molecules and the properties of the ice itself. The tales they contain of thousands of years of climate changes provide intimations, and warnings, of our fate. That is why people like glaciologist Kendrick Taylor of Nevada's Desert Research Institute are drawn here. By drilling to the base of the ice sheet and extracting a 3,300-ft.-long series of ice cores, he hopes to answer new and urgent questions about the nature of global climate change...