Word: najaf
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...stories they recount in the refugee camps in the Iraqi town of Safwan are appalling. "Iraqi troops sent a tank to knock down the door of the holy shrine of Najaf," recalls Hajj Hattin. "Then they began looting all the deserted homes. They shot people at random in front of the crowds." Hajj Mohammed remembers a helicopter gunship shooting at civilians in the streets of Najaf. Iraqi soldiers "went into schools to threaten small children into giving the names of relatives they could accuse of being rebels," he says. "If the child did not answer, they shot...
...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 as they fled the allies. The holy sites of Karbala and Najaf, so meticulously avoided by coalition bombing raids, were reportedly ravaged. In some cases targeted with napalm and phosphorus, thousands of civilians streamed toward the southern sector of the country occupied by U.S. troops. Ordered not to intervene, American soldiers could offer little more than food, water and medical assistance...
Another possibility is that the Army's XVIII Airborne Corps will attack the Iraqi town of Najaf, a transportation hub halfway between Baghdad and the Saudi border that could act as an allied supply-and-staging post. Speed is critical to concentrate forces for an attack and then disperse before the enemy can pull itself together for a counterattack...
...sweep away the Shah. Soon after his release a few months later, Khomeini was arrested again, this time for fomenting riots against a modernization program that included land reform. He was imprisoned for half a year, then exiled to Turkey. He soon moved to the Iraqi city of An Najaf, one of Shi'ism's holiest shrines. There for 14 years he taught, meditated and taped messages of hate against the Shah that were distributed on cassettes to mosques back in Iran...
...international border, the sand is littered with Iranian bodies as far as the eye can see, when it is not squinting against the blowing sand. An Iraqi bulldozer is pushing the corpses into a hastily dug burial ground. Pennants were found among the bodies, reading NEXT STOP, AN NAJAF, the Shi'ite holy city in central Iraq where Khomeini spent 14 years in exile plotting the overthrow of the Shah...