Word: hammadis
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...political asylum during the Cold War. Fugitive U.S. financier Bobby Vesco allegedly stole $224 million from a Swiss mutual fund but avoided detection for years by hopping between Caribbean islands that did not have extradition laws (and once even tried buy his own island). And Lebanon's Mohammed Ali Hammadi, wanted in the for murdering a U.S. Navy passenger during the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight, fled to his homeland, which has no treaty with the U.S. and refuses to give...
Andalus Abdel-Rahim Hammadi, a Baghdad school-bus driver, has this much in common with John McCain: both men gambled on the U.S. military's "surge" in Iraq long before it looked like a sure thing. If the Arizona Senator risked his presidential ambitions on it, the stakes for Hammadi were higher: his life and the lives of his wife and two young children. Last summer, as the final batch of 30,000 additional American troops requisitioned by General David Petraeus was arriving in Iraq, the bus driver and his family left their refuge in Syria to return home...
Going back to al-Dora was out of the question: it would be six months before al-Qaeda in Iraq would be driven from the neighborhood. But in nearby Saydiyah, Hammadi found a family heading in the opposite direction--to Syria--and offered to live in their house as an unpaid caretaker. He borrowed some money to buy a dilapidated minibus. Ferrying kids to and from school brought him a meager $10 a day, but it was better than living off handouts from cousins in Damascus. His wife Shada, 30, supplemented the family income by baking bread and selling...
...Hammadis were settling into their new life when I left Baghdad last fall after spending the best part of five years covering Iraq. Unlike the bus driver, I was far from sanguine about the surge; I had seen too many military plans promise much and deliver little. But by the end of the year, Hammadi's optimism was looking prescient. Sunni insurgents I had known for years--men who had sworn blood oaths to fight the "occupier" until their dying breath--were joining forces with the Americans to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq. The vehemently anti-American Shi'ite cleric...
...perhaps the most remarkable change of all is in how Baghdadis view the U.S. military presence. A year ago, Hammadi was in a minority: most Iraqis living outside the Green Zone saw the Americans as the main cause of their country's problems. Now, says Ali al-Dabbagh, spokesman for the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, all the credit for the decline in violence is going to the U.S. military: "People think the Americans are like Superman, who can do anything...