Word: ite
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Saddam took aim first at the south, where he gathered the remnants of his defeated army and the armor that escaped the allies into a loyal force that rapidly overwhelmed the weak and ill-equipped Shi'ite insurgents. He dispatched two Republican Guard divisions that had been stationed around Baghdad to ensure the efficiency of the Iraqi troops that had failed so miserably against the allied coalition. This time it was the Shi'ite rebels who were doomed to failure. They lacked a joint command-and-communications system and were dependent largely on weapons and ammunition abandoned by Iraqi soldiers...
...often during her years at 10 Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher cut to the heart of a policy question. A fiery debate over whether the U.S. and its allies should have helped Kurdish and Shi'ite rebels topple Saddam Hussein raged in Europe as well as America. But as far as current policy goes, the wrangling is meaningless because the fighting is effectively over. Right or wrong, the decision was made not to get involved in an Iraqi civil war. Saddam has smashed the revolts; he will stay in power at least temporarily -- and for the moment that pretty much...
...effect, by not helping the rebels fighting to oust the archdemon. Bush, after all, denounced the Iraqi dictator as being in some respects "worse than Hitler," organized a multinational crusade to crush his military power and repeatedly called for his overthrow. For the past four weeks, Shi'ite Muslims in the south and Kurds in the north have been trying to accomplish just that. Yet after Bush met with his top national security advisers last week, the President made it clear that U.S. military forces now occupying southern Iraq will give no overt assistance to the rebels...
That probably means no one will save the Iraqi rebels. Like the U.S., Iraq's neighboring powers would dearly love to see Saddam overthrown. But also like the U.S. -- though for different reasons -- they are unwilling to give the insurrectionists enough help to assure their victory. Overwhelmingly Shi'ite Iran has allowed some Iraqis who either defected or were taken prisoner during the 1980-88 war between the two countries to infiltrate back into Iraq and join the Shi'ite rebels in the south. There are widespread suspicions that Iran has smuggled some arms to them too, though Tehran denies...
OVER SPRING BREAK in London, a friend of mine met an Iraqi student (a Shi'ite from the holy city of Karbala) who described watching the secret police take his parents away in the middle of the night. They were kept imprisoned for years, during which he didn't know whether they were dead or alive...