Word: personnel
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...Green Zone is guarded by a crazy quilt of security personnel--Georgian soldiers, Peruvian security guards, Iraqi army, Iraqi police and U.S. soldiers. Moving around the area requires learning a peculiar patois. Upon arriving at a routine checkpoint, you are typically greeted with a succession of questions and demands, issued in Georgian ("gamarjoba," or hello), Spanish ("amigo"), English ("badge"), Arabic ("silah," or weapon) and Iraqi slang ("mamnoon," or thank you). During the course of a recent day of meetings in the Green Zone, I was sniffed by dogs six times, sent my bags through four metal detectors, was photographed once...
...logging 12-hour days to build the new $592 million U.S. embassy, a small city of low-slung, thick concrete buildings with small windows on the banks of the Tigris. When it's finished this fall, the new compound will be the largest embassy ever built. Nearly all U.S. personnel will move out of the Saddam-era Republican Palace and a nearby warren of temporary trailers, where they currently live. In making the move, the U.S. aims to shrink its massive security cordon and hand the marble-floored halls of the palace back to the Iraqis...
...ratcheting up security measures and evicting all nonofficial personnel, the U.S. and Iraqi authorities may be able to restore some of the Green Zone's former impregnability. But there's no guarantee that will last, and it comes at a cost. With the new security restrictions being erected and a bunker mentality increasingly taking hold, the U.S. civilian presence is likely to retreat inward, behind the walls of its new embassy--and even further away from the reality of Iraq's dysfunction...
...class. So, while he is said to pay greater heed to the counsel of more pragmatic advisers such as Larijani and former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Supreme Leader is careful to accommodate the popularly elected President Ahmadinejad. For example, while the recent compromise with Britain over the 15 Naval personnel captured at sea may have been brokered in substantial part in talks between Larijani and key British officials, it was Ahmadinejad who got to do the populist grandstanding in the ceremony accompanying their release...
...from taking root. But as the January firefight that left a dozen Tunisian radicals dead after they'd returned from Algeria attests, some degree of regional cooperation already exists for al-Qaeda to build upon. Underground groups in Algeria, Niger, Mali, and Mauritania have long trafficked materiel, weapons and personnel among themselves. A January 2005 attack on a military post in Mauritania by fighters of the Algerian GSPC prompted the U.S. and certain European states to begin funding the $100 million annual Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative, seeking to make the enormous region less hospitable to its free-roaming jihadists...