Word: iraq
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...military officer agrees. "We are, after eight long years of war, creating not just a new generation of veterans, but a new generation of leaders," Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says in a forward to the study. "This report is evidence that veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are ready to reconnect to their communities; they just don't have access to our knowledge of all the pathways...
...says, that the country might turn into a safe haven for illegal immigrants. "We don't want Nepal to be a hub for human-trafficking," says Bhattarai. The government recently imposed a ban on issuing on-arrival visas for the residents of a dozen countries, including Somalia, Burma, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Sudan...
Behind-the-scenes U.S. pressure has finally forced Iraq's leaders to accept a political compromise, with Sunday's vote in the Iraqi parliament to adopt an electoral law setting rules for national elections in January - and potentially clearing the path to withdrawal for tens of thousands of U.S. troops. (See a photo-essay of six years with U.S. troops in Iraq...
...vote had been delayed for weeks over the apparently parochial issue of electoral lists for the contested northern city of Kirkuk. Oil-rich Kirkuk, claimed by Iraq's Kurds as an integral part of their autonomous semistate but administered by the Arab-dominated government in Baghdad, has long been a potential flash point in the uneasy relationship between the Kurdish autonomous region and Baghdad. Sunday's compromise, which allows recent Kurdish returnees (much of the city's Kurdish population had been expelled by Saddam Hussein, precisely to cement Arab control there) to vote in Kirkuk but gives parliament the authority...
...Ever since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, observers have viewed Kirkuk, which is coveted by Kurds, Turkomans and Arabs, as a potential trip wire for civil war. The fact that it has remained largely stable owes much to the cosmopolitan character of the city's native population, and the city's heroic local police force led by three generals - a Kurd, an Arab and a Turkoman. The relative calm in Kirkuk may also be a vindication of the Baghdad government's foot-dragging over the question of whether to turn Kirkuk over to Kurdish control. (See pictures of Iraq...