Word: ramadi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha was gloomy when I met him at his compound in Ramadi last December. A few days earlier a friend of his had died, U.S. Army Capt. Travis Patriquin, the military's tribal liaison for the area. Patriquin and Sattar had worked closely together late last year, when Sattar first emerged as the leader of a band of tribes around Ramadi coming together to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq. Sattar, like other tribal leaders of Anbar Province, had fallen out with al-Qaeda in Iraq after years of complacency and cooperation with insurgents targeting U.S. forces...
...Combat Team of the 1st Cavalry Division, and watched him coordinate reconstruction efforts and deftly manage the political-economic interactions with local shopkeepers and citizens. We accompanied Colonel John Charlton, commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division, to a meeting with the mayor of Ramadi. In these and other instances, I witnessed sophisticated political-military leadership...
...worst sensation comes, of course, when the blast is nearest. In December, I was in Ramadi. After a short foot patrol with Marines, I walked back into the tiny base nestled on a bad street in the city. Minutes after I entered, a huge mortar slammed into the doorway through which I just passed. The entire building shook as though some huge hand had shoved it. Inside, I felt like my bones for a second had turned to metal, and someone had rung me with a sledgehammer...
...dead and offered a horrifying glimpse of the kind of organized assaults that American officials fear could unfold nationwide. Imagine a day in Iraq when catastrophic car bombs rip through not just one Iraqi city but several. Explosions coordinated to go off nearly simultaneously in places like Baghdad, Baqubah, Ramadi, Fallujah and Mosul, all places where insurgents are actively pursuing bombing campaigns, could bring about the highest death daily death toll seen yet and leave no question about the insurgency's ability to hold the entire country in a deadly grip more or less at will. That's one version...
...strategy in Anbar was born of desperation and launched on the idea there was little to lose in a region where the insurgency's grip never fully loosened on cities in Anbar like Ramadi and Fallujah despite heavy fighting and high causalities by U.S. forces. "Right now there are no downsides to it," said Ambassador Lawrence Butler, who works on U.S. policy towards Iraq at the State Department in Washington. Butler said overall U.S. policy as of now aims to support the kind of tribal alliances U.S. forces have made in Anbar...