Word: iraq
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Turkey will need to deal with its Kurdish problem, including ending hostilities with a militant group, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who have about 3,000 guerrillas based in the mountains of northern Iraq. Turkish officials seem to recognize this. A trilateral commission of Iraqi Kurd, Turkish and U.S. officials meets regularly to discuss a possible PKK amnesty. Other measures on the agenda in Ankara include restoring Kurdish place-names and cleaning up the jingoistic billboards that litter the southeast. What's really needed is a more democratic constitution. But the government has backtracked on that promise before...
...helps that Turkish Kurds now have a role model of their own. Kurdistan is still a taboo word in Turkey, but Turkish Kurds have watched with fascination the developments in neighboring Iraq over the past few years. Iraqi Kurds have built up a largely self-governing region with its own parliament and flag. For the first time in history, the Kurds - an ancient people spread out across Iran, Syria, Turkey and Iraq - have what looks like a state. "The emergence of Kurdistan has fostered a sense of self-confidence here," says Sezgin Tanrikulu, a prominent lawyer in Diyarbakir. "Not because...
...wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now the longest waged by an all-volunteer force in U.S. history. Even as soldiers rotate back into the field for multiple and extended tours, the Army requires a constant supply of new recruits. But the patriotic fervor that led so many to sign up after 9/11 is now eight years past. That leaves recruiters with perhaps the toughest, if not the most dangerous, job in the Army. Last year alone, the number of recruiters who killed themselves was triple the overall Army rate. Like posttraumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, recruiter suicides...
...stations on Main Streets and in strip malls is a work environment as stressful in its own way as combat. The hours are long, time off is rare, and the demand to sign up at least two recruits a month is unrelenting. Soldiers who have returned from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan now constitute 73% of recruiters, up from 38% in 2005. And for many of them, the pressure is just too much. "These kids are coming back from Iraq with problems," says a former Army officer who recently worked in the Houston Recruiting Battalion...
...came from Texas - the highest share of any state - and recruiters in Harris County enlisted 1,104, just 37 shy of first-place Phoenix's Maricopa County. The Houston unit's nearly 300 recruiters are spread among 49 stations across southeast Texas. Since 2005, four members recently back from Iraq or Afghanistan have committed suicide while struggling, as recruiters say, to "put 'em in boots." TIME has obtained a copy of the Army's recently completed 2-inch-thick (50 mm) report of the investigation into the Houston suicides. Its bottom line: recruiters there have toiled under a "poor command...