Word: ghadeer
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...violently against the side of her head. "I have to take some of it out and put it down somewhere, or I will burst." The effort seems to have taken over Nouman's life to the exclusion of everything else. Her small home in Baghdad's working-class al-Ghadeer district is filthy; the rooms are damp and smell of rotting garbage. Her pets, a mangy brown pup and two molting cats, have shed clumps of fur on her bed, an old foam mattress on the living-room floor. There are pieces of stale bread everywhere. But the squalor doesn...
...wearing a flowing black dishdash and holding aloft a flaming torch like some athlete carrying the Olympic flame. I should have known better than to get out of the car for a closer look: all the other vehicles on the fly-over into the western Baghdad district of Al-Ghadeer were speeding away. Mohammed, my driver/translator, shouted at me to stop, but I assumed he was warning me about the approaching traffic. I didn't sense danger until I approached the green verge alongside the canal - where I noticed the people in street alongside were ducking into their houses...
...waited for the second mound to blow itself out before going back, hoping to speak to the people living closest to the caches. But they were too frightened to answer the door. But when I returned several hours later, Al-Ghadeer had reverted to its true self, a sleepy middle-class residential neighborhood in the western outskirts of the Iraqi capital. Blackened holes in the ground were all that remained of the two caches. The local kids had gathered up most of the shrapnel and were now playing soccer in the compound. The residents of the houses closest...
...what happened to the caches in Al-Ghadeer was no accident. Who was the man with the torch? Dental technician Amjad Sha'ab, 30, who saw the man running away, speculated that he was a member of the Saddam Fedayeen. Amjad's brother Ahmad, 36, said it was "a foreigner," shorthand for the Arab volunteers, mainly from Syria, who remain at large in Baghdad...