Word: samarra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...including many American officers on the ground, that if the gangs of anti-U.S. fighters have not yet coalesced into a true insurgency, they are trying hard to become one. Attacks against coalition forces have grown bolder, better organized and broader based. A double ambush last week in Samarra "was the biggest, most sophisticated so far," says a senior intelligence official in Washington. (See "What Really Happened?") As a Pentagon official sees it: "They know they can't beat us militarily, but they think they might be able to defeat us politically." The guerrillas are trying to drive...
...Kurdish intelligence operative who recently briefed a team of Pentagon officials, Ansar soldiers training to be suicide bombers were given elaborate mock funerals to prepare them mentally for their martyrdom. After recently interrogating two captured fighters, the Kurd believes there are Ansar cells operating in Kirkuk, Mosul, Samarra and Haweja. "They have sophisticated communications methods," he says, and they keep in touch with former intelligence contacts in the Saddam regime...
...ferocity of the battle in Samarra, where reports cite eyewitnesses telling of dozens of guerrillas roaming the streets during the firefight, local civilians taking up arms to support them and rebels standing their ground against overwhelming odds, suggests that the insurgency may even be escalating. Even as President Bush insists that the U.S. will stay until the insurgents have been defeated, U.S. field commanders in Iraq canvassed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (available as a PDF download) suggested that the insurgency will continue until the U.S. forces leave. Although the political decisions have yet be made...
...bloodletting continued following the President's visit, with seven Spanish intelligence officers, two Japanese diplomats, two South Korean contractors and one from Colombia killed by insurgents over the weekend, while the U.S. military reported killing 54 Iraqis at Samarra in what may have been the biggest firefight of the occupation. The Samarra incident, which began when insurgents ambushed two U.S. convoys in an apparent attempt to steal new banknotes being delivered to the town's banks, is shrouded in mystery. The U.S. claimed to have killed first 46, then 54, many of them wearing the uniform of Saddam's Fedayeen...
Abbas, 58, was standing last week in an alley a block from his house in Samarra, 20 miles south of Tikrit, when two men with red scarves wrapped around their heads turned the corner on a black Jawa motorcycle. One of them shot Abbas in the leg and sped off. Abbas lay bleeding in the alley for an hour until an ambulance arrived. None of his neighbors went to his aid. "They were frightened," he said later from his hospital bed, his right leg bandaged up to his waist, "that maybe they would be the next on the list...