Word: hamadi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...from the Saddam Hussein era that looters had reduced to little more than piles of rubble strewn around the cement slabs in the ground. Displaced from other parts of Iraq, these people have taken up shelter in makeshift houses on the otherwise deserted grounds. Among them is Hadi Shaker Hamadi and his clan, cobbling together a shelter of cinderblocks, scrap wood and cardboard. They and the 70 or so other families here take charity whenever it comes. And only one person seems to deliver it regularly. Says Hamadi, "It's just Madeeha who comes and visits...
That means tens of thousands of people like Hadi Shaker Hamadi are left to fend for themselves in what remains one of the world biggest humanitarian crises. A Shi'ite, Hamadi was working as a farmhand in Samarra four years ago when he began getting threats from Sunni militants in the area. Several of his friends had already been murdered in sectarian violence, he said. So he decided to move his wife and seven children out. They headed to Baghdad, where they had no family who might help them. Arriving in the city, they looked around for areas where they...
...Colonel Hamadi (not his real name) was commander of a tank unit in Iraq's Third Army before he was arrested for links--which he denies--to an opposition party. He was held for 10 months. Saddam's military intelligence, he says, tortured him several times a week. "Sometimes they hung me from a ceiling fan to make me confess to something that was not true," says the colonel. When he was released last spring, he fled to northern Iraq, where the country's Kurdish minority functions almost autonomously from Baghdad under the protection of the U.S.-British...
...Colonel Hamadi says the army he left behind last year was in sorry shape, demoralized, underpaid and ill equipped. Of the 33 tanks in his sector, he says, 15 were out of commission. In a land of oil wells, there was even a shortage of tank lubricant. Washington officials say sanctions have worked well to undermine Saddam's 424,000-man army. Only the 100,000 or so Republican Guards are still considered serious fighters. So a cataclysmic collapse of the army under pressure from U.S. attack is possible. But experts inside and outside Iraq count...