Word: iraq
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...junior year at Princeton University, Donovan Campbell decided to take the Marine Corps officer training course. Good for the resume, he thought - until he grew to embrace the Corps' ideals of service, honor and sacrifice. Campbell was soon a lieutenant in charge of a platoon thrust into Ramadi, Iraq in 2004, right as that city's insurgency blossomed. Unlike Fallujah, a city full of jihadists with very few civilians, Ramadi was "a much blurrier battle, a classic urban counterinsurgency, a never-ending series of engagements throughout the heart of a teeming city where our faceless enemies blended seamlessly into...
...have seen in previous years how some government grants have been given to NGOs with political ties to parties in government," says Hashem Assaf, spokesman for the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq, an umbrella group that represents 52 international and national bodies, including Oxfam and Mercy Corps, as well as more than 200 local affiliates. "We, as NGOs, are trying to remain independent." (See TIME's 2005 Persons of the Year: The Good Samaritans...
...Iraq's civic society has blossomed since the fall of Saddam Hussein, who sought to rigidly repress it. There are some 6,250 registered organizations operating in the country today, as well as a Ministry of State for Civil Society Affairs and civil society committees in provincial governments. But there are still limitations. NGOs cannot merge with one another or form networks without the permission of the government. Furthermore, the participation of non-Iraqis, even in international NGOs, will be limited to 25% of an organization...
Assaf, the NGO representative, acknowledges that there are "corrupt elements" and for-profit associations masquerading as civic groups but says that clamping down on the majority because of a minority is unfair. The security situation is a convenient excuse for ulterior motives. "We speak of a new democratic Iraq that has put the ways of the old regime behind it, but at the same time there are things that make you think that the government wants to try and control NGOs," he says...
Still, that's exactly what Assaf says the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq hopes to do. It plans to continue advocating against articles in the law that he says will hamper its work. "We are supposed to be building a new Iraq," he says. "We don't want it to just be a slogan...