Word: karbala
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...countless other tragedies in a bloody, brutal war. There was a firefight, which killed another American; a brazen abduction; then a frantic chase leading to a heartless end. And yet from the start, the deaths of the five Americans were also shrouded in mystery. The attack took place in Karbala, a Shi'ite holy city of roughly 1 million people that had been one of the safest in Iraq for U.S. troops. It happened in plain sight of Iraqi police the Americans had been assigned to train. The killers wore U.S.-style uniforms, suggesting a catastrophic lapse of security...
...military has struggled to affix responsibility for the Karbala murders. U.S. commanders have accused the Quds Force, a paramilitary organization run by members of Iran's security establishment, of being behind the operation. On July 2 in Baghdad, the military revealed it was holding Ali Musa Daqduq, a Lebanese national who was captured in Basra in March. He is a senior operative of Hizballah (the Lebanese Shi'ite militia supported by the Quds Force), and officials say he has admitted to involvement in the attack...
...officials, who met their Iranian counterparts in Baghdad on July 24, have used the Karbala killings as evidence that Iran is sponsoring attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. But the full story of what happened that night may be even more tangled and disturbing, raising questions about the loyalties of some of the Iraqis whom U.S. troops are risking their lives to protect and support. An internal Army investigation into the attack reviewed by TIME, in addition to interviews with U.S. and Iraqi witnesses, suggest that the abduction and murders were carried out with the knowledge and complicity of Iraqi...
...pretended to be deaf and mute when U.S. interrogators questioned him. For weeks after his capture in March in the southern city of Basra, he persisted with the ruse, even though the Americans suspected him of being a key player in the Jan. 20 attack on U.S . forces in Karbala that left five soldiers dead. But eventually he cracked and began talking, revealing glimpses into the shifting world of Shi'ite militias in Iraq...
What's commonly understood about the attack is that a crack team of gunmen sneaked into the Karbala police station, where about 30 U.S. soldiers were normally at work on training programs and other initiatives aimed at building up local security forces. The attackers, who carried U.S.-style weapons, killed one American soldier after getting into the compound and then abducted four others, executing them a short distance away as the attackers fled, evading capture by abandoning their vehicles and shedding their bogus American uniforms and mock weapons...