Word: samarra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When the golden dome of the Askariya Mosque in Samarra was destroyed last year, many Iraqis blamed not the bombers who did the deed, but American soldiers for failing to protect one of Shi?ite Islam's holiest sites. That conformed to a pattern; for more than four years, the U.S. military has been Iraqis' scapegoat of choice for all the ills of their country...
...term for the security crackdown in and around Baghdad - is based on the assumption that Iraqi security forces are competent to do basic jobs such as guarding important structures. That is meant to free Americans for high-risk tasks, such as disposing of roadside bombs. But even before Samarra, there was a growing body of evidence that Iraqis aren't ready or willing to perform their appointed tasks. What does that imply for the U.S. military operation and when it might end? Or for the development of an Iraqi polity in which officials and soldiers grant the state?not sectarian...
...been amended. And there has been nothing done to reform the vetting process that has blackballed many qualified officials who were tainted by complicity in Saddam Hussein's regime. Indeed, there have been several dramatic low points in Khalilzad's tenure in Baghdad: the bombing of the Samarra shrine that unleashed an unprecedented wave of ethnic cleansing and the mishandled execution of Saddam...
...war—exert most of their energy explaining themselves. As they try to prove that they understand the complexities of Iraq and care about the continuing tragedy, mawkish sentimentality and ham-fisted didacticism join forces to drain the project of all dramatic coherence. After curfew in Samarra, in Iraq’s volatile Sunni triangle, two Iraqi teenagers approach an American checkpoint. Unarmed and submissive, the teenagers reflexively put up their hands—and the Americans respond by throwing the both off the bridge. One drowns. It’s a shocking incident, and the film sets...
Then came Samarra. The operation carried the Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi's fingerprints, but Iraqi Sunnis were the ones who would endure the bloody fallout. For many Shi'ites, this was an atrocity too far. They turned to militias such as the Mahdi Army to avenge the desecration of the site, and those militias ran amuck, slaughtering Sunnis and attacking many of their mosques. After the first, furious convulsion of violence, the militias began a more systematic campaign of kidnap and execution. The bodies of their victims, bearing signs of bestial torture, were often tossed into sewers or garbage dumps...