Word: northerner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Norris, a 28-year-old Texan, and his men at Rabiya were among nearly 4,000 American troops deployed across northern Iraq late last fall. Those who came to Mosul found themselves in the midst of a battle the U.S. military had supposedly won years ago. This northern Iraqi city of 1.8 million people was thought to have been pacified in 2003, when the 101st Airborne Division under then Major General David Petraeus executed a counterinsurgency strategy that many military analysts regarded as a model approach for the rest of Iraq. But Petraeus' successes largely disappeared soon after the 101st...
This used to be a municipal yard where the city parked dump trucks, steamrollers, backhoes and other vehicles. Norris and other officers had another spot in mind for the outpost, which overlooks the point where the main road linking Baghdad and northern Iraq meets a major artery running east and west. But insurgents had watched the troops as they scouted locations, and a sick comedy of explosions unfolded. Soldiers would eye a building and develop plans to occupy it, only to see it bombed shortly after they had visited it. At some point, someone graffitied a misspelled insult in English...
...would have inspired fears of the kind of ethnic violence that devastated the Balkans in the '90s. But these are different times. Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian leaders have belatedly tried to extend an olive branch to the province's aggrieved 120,000 Serbs. In addition to allowing Serbs in northern Kosovo to have their own police, schools and hospitals, Kosovo's new Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci, did the unthinkable: he delivered part of his inauguration speech in the hated Serbian language. Even in Serbia, whose citizens feel genuine humiliation over losing Kosovo (which Serb nationalists call their "Jerusalem"), the protests...
Better known for her tabloid love affairs, plastic surgery and husky voice, transsexual Turkish diva Bulent Ersoy makes the unlikeliest political activist. Yet she has caused a storm of outrage by becoming the only public personality to speak out against Turkey's invasion of northern Iraq. So pervasive is the nationalist climate that Ersoy has been vilified for declaring - on a national TV equivalent of American Idol, where she is a judge - that if she had a son, she would not have sent him to fight this war. She is now under investigation for being "anti-military...
Should the scene of a mass murder be demolished or preserved in a commemorative way? Northern Illinois University, the site of the Valentine's Day slaughter of five students and the apparent suicide of the killer, is now facing the same question that Columbine and Virginia Tech earlier had to grapple with...