Word: northerners
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Battling Terrorists in the Hills NORTHERN IRAQ MICHAEL WARE
...battle rages, fierce and bloody, perhaps the heaviest fighting northern Iraq has seen so far in this war. U.S. special forces are here, along with their Kurdish allies, facing down Ansar al-Islam, the diehard terrorist group based in Kurdish-controlled Iraq that the Americans believe is linked to al-Qaeda. "There are three or four isolated pockets of Ansar on very high ground. We're closing in on them from everywhere we can," says an American commando named Mark, who declined to give his rank or surname. All Saturday afternoon the Ansar fighters rain down sniper and machine...
...Mark says, "A lot of the senior cadre fled a long time ago, leaving a fanatical hard core to stay for the last stand. They had little intention of surviving." The Americans blasting away at the holdouts recognize this and lament opportunities lost. "This is my second time in northern Iraq," says a special-forces soldier. "I should be in Tampa with my wife enjoying spring break. Instead I'm here, and I wouldn't be if we'd done this right the first time...
...didn't occur to me that the missile flying over Camp Iwo Jima in the northern Kuwaiti desert might not be friendly. I'm a doctor, a medical correspondent, not a bang-bang journalist. But I noticed all the Marines around me were hitting the deck. Five seconds later, the alarm "Bunker! Bunker! Bunker!" blared over the p.a. system. Over the next 20 hours, I would share with 70 Marines and two CNN colleagues the same space and the same occupation: target...
...annals of warfare. In addition, more than 7,000 smart bombs and missiles battered the Iraqi leadership's command and control outposts and pounded the tanks and artillery of Saddam's Republican Guard. After prolonged delay, 1,000 members of the U.S.'s 173rd Airborne Brigade parachuted into northern Iraq to open a second front. A senior U.S. official told TIME that U.S. military special operations and CIA paramilitary teams are roaming all over Iraq looking to pick off key Iraqi military and civilian leadership figures...