Word: heavens
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...Instead, word of their presence and their plan leaked out and found its way to the Iraqi government, which launched a raid on Sunday that aimed to wipe the group out before it could leave its base. But the fighters of Yamani's Army of Heaven proved better prepared and more tenacious than the Iraqi military had anticipated. The area's orchards are separated from one another by high dirt berms. The Army of Heaven, armed with heavy machine guns, had turned the berms into formidable defensive positions. An Iraqi soldier who participated in the battle said the carnage...
...American air power was called in and eventually that helped break the Army of Heaven's resistance. But a U.S. helicopter was shot down, killing two American soldiers. Yamani died along with an unknown number of his fighters; many others were captured. Iraqi officials have offered varying descriptions of the fighters. They were first portrayed as al-Qaeda terrorists. Officials then acknowledged the Shi'a millenarian nature of the Army of Heaven, but still claimed the group was supported by Sunni terrorists and included foreign Arabs of the kind who flock to Iraq to fight under the banner of Sunni...
...Iraqi colonel told Time that the captured men all seemed to be Shi'a and came from heavily Shi'a areas such as Hilla, Karbala and Diwaniya. Given the chasm between the two groups' religious and political goals, an alliance between al-Qaeda and the Army of Heaven seems far-fetched. It is more likely an attempt to divert attention from unsettling realities. Chief among those realities is the Iraqi Army's inability to defeat a band of cultists without hours of air support from the U.S. military. This speaks to the limits of the Iraqi Army's competence...
...daunting historical obstacle to hurdle: its directors, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, were not nominated in their Oscar category. That citation would have been sweet, whatever you think of the movie, since the Academy has nominated a directorial pair only twice before (for West Side Story and the 1978 Heaven Can Wait), and because you could count the number of women nominated for Best Directors on the fingers of a maimed hand. (Three: Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion for The Piano and Sofia Coppola, the only American woman, for Lost in Translation...
...attempt to defuse the situation. In a similar scenario today, Lin says, China's ability to destroy satellites would reduce the effectiveness of U.S. forces, which rely heavily on them for real-time battlefield data. "Now China has the capability to knock out the eyes in the heaven for the U.S.," Lin says...