Word: ramadi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mujahedin's ranks are easily filled by Iraqis. A 29-year-old fighter who gives his name as Abu Abdullah agreed to meet in a small village outside Ramadi, home to many regime loyalists. He says he rejoiced at Saddam's downfall, believing it would bring an Islamic government to power. But religion now motivates him to oppose the U.S. "Islam tells us that no one should occupy our land," says Abu Abdullah, who earns his living by building houses along the Euphrates River. "The Koran allows us to kill anyone to defend our country." He contends that some sheiks...
...each representing a different resistance cell with at least two dozen foot soldiers apiece, carried sidearms. Abu Ali gestured toward each man, who in turn rattled off his area of operation. The place names sketched a map of trouble spots for the U.S.: Baghdad, Dora, Hilla, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Ramadi...
Still, neat lines of accountability do not guarantee the success of so audacious an enterprise as the American determination to remake Iraq. In any war, older and elemental loyalties, beliefs and suspicions can wreck even carefully laid plans. In a small town west of Ramadi last week, dozens of Iraqis milled around the shell of a house that had been wrecked a week before by missiles from a U.S. helicopter gunship, killing six resistance fighters. The visitors were there because they had heard--and believed--the rumors. The place, they said, smelled not of death but of sweet perfume...
...wished to interview members of an Iraqi resistance group, he should show up at a specified address in Baghdad the following day at 8 a.m. Bennett arrived at the appointed hour and got into a car that sped west out of the capital. Halfway between Fallujah and Ramadi, he was blindfolded, and the car turned off the highway. After 10 minutes it stopped. His guide explained that they were placing wooden planks over a canal. They drove over the water and into a grove of baby pomegranate trees...
Once inside the country, says a Pentagon official in Iraq, "it's not hard for [infiltrators] to link up with fellow travelers." Sources inside the anti-U.S. resistance say foreign fighters have congregated west of Baghdad, in the conservative Sunni strongholds of Fallujah and Ramadi, where they receive shelter, food and weapons from local Islamic militants and members of the Fedayeen Saddam militia--though intelligence officials say there's no evidence of active collaboration between the outsiders and regime loyalists...