Word: kutting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...test of wills." General John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom) responsible for Iraq, told Bush in a video-conference call last Friday that his troops were not seeing Sunni-Shi'ite cooperation in any structural or systematic way. In the south, U.S. forces reclaimed the city of Kut from the short-lived control of al-Sadr's militia. But Pentagon officials warned that the conflict against al-Sadr and his supporters might drag on: the Shi'ite festival of Arbaeen on Sunday attracted hundreds of thousands of worshippers to Karbala and Najaf, where al-Sadr was holed...
...seen the heaviest fighting since the end of the war as U.S. and Coalition forces battle Sunni and Shiite insurgents for control of the streets in Baghdad's Shiite slums, the Sunni Triangle towns of Fallujah, Ramadi and Baquba; and the southern Shiite cities of Najaf, Karbala, Nasiriyah, Kut, Amara, Diwaniyah and Basra. At least 32 U.S. troops and more than 200 Iraqis have been killed in the past four days, and the fighting is showing no signs of abating. And the fact that the Sunni militants who have waged a year-long insurgency are now joined, in Baghdad...
...Triangle. But the outbreak of hostilities in the southern cities has put troops from Italy, Spain, El Salvador, Poland, Ukraine and Bulgaria on the front lines. The Bulgarian government called on Wednesday for U.S. reinforcements to help its 450 soldiers under fire in Karbala, while the Ukrainian contingent at Kut was chased out of town by angry Shiites who took over their base. And the Iraqi security forces on which the U.S. hopes to rely increasingly have offered little cause for comfort - mostly, the Iraqi police simply melted away when the Sadrists arrived to take over their facilities...
...Sadr's movement is believed to represent a minority among Iraqi Shiites, although one apparently far more substantial than Coalition officials may be comfortable admitting. The fact that after three days of fighting his forces remain in control of government facilities they seized in Najaf, Kufa and Kut, as well as the streets of the sprawling Baghdad slum of Sadr City, suggests the 30-year-old firebrand commands substantial support among the Shiite urban poor. More importantly, however, while more moderate and influential Shiite leaders such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani hedge their bets in response to Moqtada's challenge...
...this is about as colorful an anecdote as you'll ever hear about John Maxwell Coetzee (kut-see-uh). He is intensely private (some say cripplingly shy) and deeply (some say coldly) intellectual, but above all, he is a grand master of the complex game of postmodern literary theory, inclined to speak--when he speaks at all--in riddles and codes. As a South African, he lived in a society in which writers were always issuing polemics and producing grimly realistic novels about our perpetual crisis. Not Coetzee. He still declines to take sides, join causes or issue comments...