Word: saddams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Deraa was born Ismail al-Zarjawi to a poor family in Sadr City. After a career in petty crime during the Saddam Hussein years, he became one of the first recruits of al-Sadr's Mahdi Army after the dictator's fall. "When the Americans entered the country and kicked Saddam out, we were very happy," Abu Deraa says. "But then we discovered their bad intentions against Iraq, so we started attacking the occupation forces." In the spring of 2004 he participated in the Shi'ite uprising against U.S. forces in Sadr City. That was also when he earned...
...atrocities he is suspected of perpetrating against Sunnis that have earned him notoriety and helped plunge Iraq into civil war. Sunni leaders and some government officials blame him for the June 21 murder of one of Saddam's lawyers, the July 9 daylight slaughter of up to 50 Sunnis and the July 15 kidnapping of 30 officials from the Iraqi Olympic Committee. Unlike al-Zarqawi, Abu Deraa issued no statements and released no videos, except for a semicomic webcast, available on YouTube, that shows him offering a Pepsi to a camel. Still, his renown has spread beyond Iraq. On Internet...
...Iraq war. The attempt to create a unified, democratic Iraq is doomed to failure. Modern Iraq as we know it has never been politically unified; religious and tribal factionalism has been suppressed by either the strictly autocratic rule of a British-imposed monarchy or the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The new U.S. Congress and President George W. Bush should make the issue of resolving the Iraq war their very first priority in January...
...that are threatening to drag Iraq into a civil war. In the past two weeks alone, Baghdad has seen the most audacious kidnapping (150 men taken captive from a government office in broad daylight) and the deadliest bombing (more than 210 killed in Sadr City) since the fall of Saddam Hussein...
...Amid the frenzy of repopulation, mixed neighborhoods like Washash have become the main battlegrounds of sectarian warfare. The slum is a maze of tumbledown buildings and is home to 40,000 people - during Saddam's time, roughly divided between Sunnis and Shi'ites. As TIME's Tim McGirk reported on a visit to Washash in August 2005, low-level sectarian murders began more than a year ago. When U.S. soldiers moved into the neighborhood about a month ago to quell the bloodshed, Shi'ites and Sunnis appeared to be targeting one another unpredictably. But as U.S. soldiers learned more about...