Word: safwan
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...Also insecure is the town of Safwan. This was the first town taken last week -but now armed Baathist party members have regrouped, and last night were about to attack a group of journalists camped out near that town until the British military told the reporters to leave quickly, under the cover of darkness. They spent an uncomfortable night further up the road to Nasiriyah before being evaucated to Kuwait this morning by a military convoy...
...farmer Shadat Dafeh Hamed mumbles, "I can't see them, but I know they are there." Hamed, 70, lives closer to the enemy than any other Iraqi. His mud-and-concrete house is scarcely 500 yards from the ridge; his village, Khardeh (pop. 280), adjoins the border post of Safwan, where Iraq signed the cease-fire agreement to end the Gulf War. Hamed is head of a family of 32, including two wives, 11 sons and 12 grandchildren. His memories of 1991 are a bit muddled, but he remembers how one morning American troops quietly and swiftly surrounded his village...
...March 3, 1991, under a hastily pitched tent at Safwan air base in southern Iraq, General Norman Schwarzkopf gazed across the table at two grim-faced Iraqi generals and calmly dictated cease-fire terms that put an end to the six-week Gulf War. Stunned to learn that the U.S.-led forces had captured more than 60,000 of his soldiers, Iraqi Lieut. General Sultan Hashim Ahmad al- Jabbari acceded to each and every condition. "His face went completely pale," Schwarzkopf later recounted. "He had had no concept of the magnitude of their defeat...
Last week as American troops turned over an observation post north of Safwan to U.N. observers, both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia tried to assure the refugees that their worst dreams were not coming to pass. Colonel William Nash, commanding officer of U.S. forces in Safwan, told General Gunther Greindl, head of the U.N. observer force, "We will continue to protect the refugees in this area." In Saudi Arabia, General Khalid bin Sultan al-Saud, head of the Saudi forces during the war, announced that his government would accept and shelter the stranded Iraqis by building a $30 million camp...
Among the Safwan refugees, news of the aid met with mixed emotions. Many of the better-educated refugees are wary about moving to what could become a permanent camp in the Saudi desert. Still, as a Baghdad professor put it, "Any country in the world is better than Iraq...