Word: emirs
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...sweeping economic sanctions, but almost all troops landing in the desert to bolster the tiny Saudi army were American. The situation remained dangerously unstable. President Bush vowed not only to defend the Persian Gulf but also to force Saddam to disgorge Kuwait. Saddam formally annexed the Emir's kingdom, dropped all pretenses of a military pullout and called for a holy war to "burn the land under the feet of the aggressive invaders...
While an estimated 300 Iraqi tanks prowled the city, an additional 50 surrounded the Emir's palace and the nearby U.S. embassy. But the Emir, Sheik Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, and his family were able to flee to Saudi Arabia by helicopter. Though the invaders had quickly seized Kuwait's radio and television station, a hidden transmitter continued to broadcast exhortations to resist the raiding foreigners and pleas for help from other Arab states. "O Arabs, Kuwait's blood and honor are being violated. Rush to its rescue!" cried a voice thought to be the crown prince...
Though help never came, Kuwaiti troops put up small pockets of resistance. At the palace, the country's symbolic heart, the Kuwaitis held their own through a two-hour artillery barrage. During the battle, the Emir's younger brother Fahd was killed. The Iraqi force assigned to secure the oil rigs off Kuwait's shores saw the most action. Kuwaiti troops and missile boats managed to sink and burn an unknown number of Iraqi landing craft and escort ships. By early afternoon, however, nearly all Kuwait's guns had been silenced. In all, it is estimated that 200 Kuwaitis were...
Concocting the flimsiest of excuses for an invasion, the Iraqis announced that they had entered the country at the invitation of the Free Interim Government, which had supposedly seized control of the country from the Emir. This previously unknown organization was said to be made up of "young revolutionaries." But no one bought the tale. "Instead of staging a coup d'etat before the invasion, they got it the wrong way around," said Thomas Pickering, Washington's U.N. ambassador...
...this is a Gypsy Godfather, its spiky authenticity achieved by an almost all Gypsy cast. Director Emir Kusturica (When Father Was Away on Business) neither romanticizes nor flinches from the popular image of Gypsies as a primitive, stealthy people. But he also sees them as a Third World nation of wanderers, displaced and dispossessed in the midst of European bounty. They can survive only on their dreams and their cunning; the film's buoyant visual style is true to both. It is the style of magic realism, the blending of grit and sorcery that soars through the novels of Gabriel...