Word: guerrillas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...highest-ranking officer at the front was honest in assessing one of the most unsettling battlefield surprises: Iraqis are resisting vigorously. And they're doing so in ways that seem to have caught Washington off guard--that is, by embedding paramilitary forces behind the front lines to engage in guerrilla tactics that can't win the war but can dangerously drag it out. If the Pentagon's plan was to fight from the "inside out"--a lightning drive on Baghdad to decapitate the regime and then liberate the rest of the country--Saddam has counterattacked from the outside...
...Fedayeen were schooled to become a ruthless instrument for quelling dissent. Skilled in torture and assassination and willing to die for Saddam, the Fedayeen are perfectly suited to their dual mission behind enemy lines. They have always operated outside the law, so they don't flinch at adopting guerrilla ruses damned by the Geneva Convention. They're willing to turn their AK-47s on Iraqis to keep them from surrendering. British officers say the Fedayeen are forcing the unwilling remnants of Iraq's 51st Infantry Division to continue the fight at Basra...
...military operation, Brezhnev was told, would be over in three or four weeks. Two weeks later, the Soviets began an invasion that was to last nearly a decade and chill U.S.-Soviet relations for years. By the law of unintended consequences, the U.S. decision to back an anti-Soviet guerrilla force of mujahedin was to rebound disastrously with the rise of Islamic terrorism, when Osama bin Laden eventually found in the shattered Afghanistan a vital haven. --By Johanna McGeary
...hands of overmatched enemy forces that nevertheless tried to fight off the invaders. Allied troops found themselves in fire fights near the cities of Samawah, Basra and Nasiriyah. Some Iraqi soldiers left their positions, put on plain clothes and vanished into the populace, raising concerns that they would stage guerrilla attacks on Western troops as they drew closer. Despite signs of weakening Iraqi morale, the mass surrenders witnessed at the end of the first Gulf War had yet to materialize. "We think they're coming," a senior Pentagon official said late last week. "We've really only been bombing...
Urban combat, chemical weapons, civilian casualties, guerrilla warfare, humanitarian crises in the south, instability in the north--whatever the unknowns that lurked ahead, the war machine was undeterred, as evidenced by the various units rolling across the desert, preparing to deliver the ultimate blow to the Iraqi regime. While each day that the war drags on gives the Iraqis a chance to regroup, it also grants allied forces the opportunity to reload. As the 3rd Infantry Division made its way past Nasiriyah, a long column of the 101st Airborne Division barreled out of Kuwait into the desert on a parallel...