Word: halabja
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...muddy battlefields near the town of Halabja on the Iran-Iraq border, the Kurdish militants of Komal guard the northern flank of the war's principal aggressors, Ansar al Islam. Western and local intelligence services have suggested variously that Ansar is backed by al-Qaeda, Tehran and Baghdad. Whatever the identity of its sponsors, Ansar has proved to be a major headache for the local authorities - the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which runs the eastern section of the Kurdish region protected by the Anglo-American "no-fly" zone. For the past year, Ansar fighters have periodically attacked and overrun...
...eastern part of the territory liberated from Saddam Hussein in 1991, against Ansar, a small cadre of homegrown Islamic militants supported, trained and reinforced by Osama bin Laden's organization. And today, as a Bush administration envoy met Iraqi opposition leaders at Erbil, some 150 miles north of Halabja, Ansar played rough...
...suicide bomber used a Land Rover taxi that regularly plies the route between Halabja and the town of Sayyid Sadiq to help him cross from Ansar-held territory into the zone controlled by government forces. He detonated his charges when confronted by government troops at a roadside checkpoint, killing two soldiers, the taxi driver and himself. The attack coincided with a conference of Iraqi opposition organizations on a post-Saddam political order, attended by Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition. Though believed to have been simply coincidental, the timing was poignant: Khalizad had come...
...bomber, carrying a package of explosives and ball bearings strapped to his chest, was the sole passenger in the Land Rover taxi, sitting behind the driver and passing through a number of checkpoints. But when he neared Halabja, two wary soldiers had asked the passenger to produce his ID. Although local officials believe the bomber's intended target may have been the nearby military headquarters, once accosted by the government soldiers he knew he would get no further. Opening the left rear door, he stepped out with one hand in his pocket, a finger poised on the trigger mechanism. TIME...
...daily basis. On Monday night, TIME's correspondent had sheltered with a peshmerga frontline unit through a four-hour barrage. But the resort to suicide tactics shifts the boundaries. Some of the soldiers present during the attack at the Zamaqi roadblock claim a suicide bomber struck the Halabja bazaar last year. However, a Kurdish political officer assigned to oversee the Ansar front, Burhan Saeed Sofi from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party (which controls the Kurdish region's eastern half) says that attack had involved a bomb planted in advance. "This is the first time they have used a suicide...