Word: erbil
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Most of the fighting is taking place around the city of Erbil, which Talahani's forces seized last December. Barzani's army now surrounds the city, exchanging small-arms and mortar fire with the enemy and biding its time before launching a full-scale attack. Elsewhere in Kurdistan, the two factions skirmish and engage in terrorist acts. Three weeks ago, for example, a car bomb exploded in Zakhu, near the Turkish border, injuring 50 people. U.S. intelligence analysts haven't pinned down which side carried out the bombing or whether it was the work of Saddam's agents trying...
Less than 20 miles north of Erbil, commander in chief Barzani was granting confident interviews from his luxurious new headquarters -- the concrete villa of Saddam Hussein in the hill town of Salahuddin. "We realize that an independent Kurdistan is out of the question," he told TIME. "All we want is the right to till our land in peace, the right to local government, the right to speak our language and have it taught in our schools." The rebel leader's bodyguard lounged around in the pink-and-beige interior, staring out through floor-to-ceiling windows at the snowy mountains...
...defeat was equally swift. With the south subdued, Saddam was able to move 100,000 more troops north, rapidly outnumbering the Kurdish fighters. Within a week government forces had relieved the siege of Mosul, the third largest city in Iraq. In the same period, Kirkuk, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Zakhu and other Kurdish-occupied cities were reconquered...
...preparations for the battle begin at 6 a.m. at the only gas station operating in Erbil. Hundreds of vehicles line up to be filled: trucks, jeeps, Hondas, Toyotas, school buses, ambulances, three-wheelers. The uprising is at risk. Saddam's best troops have launched a five-pronged offensive backed by a panoply of modern weapons and troops who never took part in the gulf...
...Erbil one sees why everybody is fleeing. The giant mosaic portrait of Saddam on the outskirts of town is riddled with bullet holes. The Kurdish parliament building is also trashed and gaping with shell holes. No one knows what is going on, but everyone is catching fright, which soon sweeps the city as it is doing in all the other towns. On a street corner, Kurds have a snowball fight with snow out of a truck brought down from the mountains for drinking water. A young girl wandering in a yard hands the visitor a message. "For my brother...