Word: grounde
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sector can hold out much longer. Shi'ite militants thought to be from the Mahdi Army have mounted an aggressive campaign since this summer to clear Sunnis from the northern end of Ghazaliya, a formerly posh neighborhood in western Baghdad. The cleansing push has moved steadily southward, gaining ground house by house, day by day. Cartee says Mahdi Army fighters typically give Sunni families they threaten in Ghazaliya just 24 hours to leave their homes, which are then handed to Shi'ite families. Anyone who defies the deadline risks death. Few do, allowing the Mahdi Army to flip...
...Over the years, the Qixia village chiefs served as my China reality check. Compared with the days when foreign journalists had to smuggle in ground coffee in their suitcases, my life in China was positively luxurious: I sipped lattes at Starbucks and collected tips on where to buy the best pesto in Shanghai. But every few months, the Qixia men would call with an update, reminding me of some of the grim realities beyond the city's caf?s and marble-lined lobbies. Another village chief has been jailed, they would tell me. Two more have been beaten...
...messier reality emerged. What once appeared an extreme anti-Western monolith splintered into different factions. In Iraq, the ground zero of civilizational clash, the turning point was the bombing of the Samarra mosque, a site sacred to Shi'ite Muslims. From that horrifying moment onward, what had been a mainly Sunni insurgency against occupying infidel troops became a civil war between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims. The dynamic within Islam in the Middle East shifted from one that pitted Islam against the West to one that pitted Islam against itself. Evidence emerged of Iranian support for Shi'ite militias, alongside...
...sectarian militias on the side. Still, the presence of U.S. forces might have deterred the kidnappers. Chiarelli has been one of the most prominent military figures to downplay the potential gains of increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. But he acknowledges the effect of troops on the ground. "Those things that are purely sectarian, normally our mere presence, the mere presence of coalition forces, causes them to stop, at least as long as we're there," he says...
...Odierno, the new ground commander in Iraq, is thought to favor a U.S. troop surge. He comes to the job with a reputation as an aggressive commander, even sounding a bit like Bush in advocating a stay-the-course approach when he addressed a panel of lawmakers and military experts in Washington last March. Odierno spoke in hypothetical terms about the need to integrate seamlessly reserve units and active-duty forces to sustain an emergency military surge, should one ever be needed...