Word: ragtag
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...slopes a dozen villagers joined a ragtag band from the Kurdistan Communist Party that maintains the sole defensive bunker in the area. In all, no more than twenty-five men headed out to meet the Iraqi column. What they found was a company of about 100 infantry soldiers, backed by armored vehicles and at least two or three tanks. As the Iraqi column neared they spotted the local men with their rifles. The men waited for the Iraqis to turn on them...
...Islamic rule, the group raised its profile three years ago by blowing up beauty parlors and sloshing acid in the faces of unveiled Kurdish women. Ansar, like Saddam Hussein, is arrayed against the separatist Kurds of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdestan Democratic Party (KDP), whose ragtag forces lie between it and Baghdad. Ansar hates all infidels, but mainly the ones in its neighborhood. "If they could get to Americans, they would spare no effort to do so," says a senior Kurdish intelligence official, "but since they cannot, they are happy to kill us instead...
...would unravel the mystery of why these teachers were targeted on a mountain road leading to the giant Grasberg mine, which is run by P.T. Freeport Indonesia (PTFI), a subsidiary of New Orleans-based Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold. The military blamed the attack on the Free Papua Movement, a ragtag group of Papua rebels fighting a desultory war to free the province from Indonesian rule, but produced scant evidence to back the claim. Meanwhile, relatives of the slain teachers have grown increasingly frustrated by the inability of local police and the U.S. government to find answers. "We respected our government...
...Pakistani Frontier Corps, which is responsible for guarding the border, is a ragtag, disorganized militia that isn't even part of the country's regular army or security forces. Recruited locally and often unpaid, Corps members are susceptible to al-Qaeda bribes. U.S. intelligence material suggests that the Corps has been infiltrated by al-Qaeda, with the terrorists sometimes donning their uniforms and venturing into Afghanistan. There is also growing evidence that al-Qaeda members have been posing as Afghan government troops to get around and attack U.S. patrols...
...write, the U.S. wouldn't have dared launch its long-distance strikes against Serbia if Belgrade had possessed "the ability to take the war into the enemy's territory"?as China can do with missiles that can hit U.S. bases in Japan. And in Somalia, where a warlord's ragtag militia killed 18 soldiers in 1993, "The American people immediately had a strong response, forcing the U.S. Army to withdraw," the authors observe...