Word: shatt
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...familiar predicament for Basra. Strategically poised on the bank of the Shatt al Arab, one of the Middle East's busiest waterways, the city has been a juicy target for raiders, including the Persians, Turks and British, for more than 600 years. It was heavily shelled by the Iranians during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. In the 1991 Gulf War, allied forces controlled access to the city but did not need to enter it in strength; the Iraqi army had pulled out without much of a fight. Could Iraqi soldiers turn and run again? That's a prospect nobody...
...most notable statues are not of Saddam but of such historic figures as the poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and the philologist Al-Khalili bin Ahmed al-Farahidi and of "martyrs" from earlier battles. The most poignant of Iraq's countless memorials is on the corniche along the Shatt al Arab: 100 bronze statues of war heroes, each pointing an accusing index finger in the direction of the old enemy, Iran...
Government officials insist the Saddam River project, a 350-mile canal linking Baghdad with the Shatt al-Arab waterway south of Basra, is intended only to add 1.5 million acres to Iraq's arable land. Arif al-Delaimi, chief engineer on the project, says the southern portion of the canal was completed in the 1980s and the marshes have been drying up ever since. Instead of driving the inhabitants out, he says, the government has been resettling them around artificial lakes. But Andrew Whitley, executive director of Middle East Watch says, "The land under the water is of little agricultural...
...Kurds resumed their fight, this time with the backing of the Shah of Iran. But they were abandoned when the Shah and Saddam Hussein cut a deal. Iran agreed to halt aid to the Kurds, and in exchange Iraq agreed to share sovereignty of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which provides access to the Persian Gulf...
...paradox evident here points to the central problematic of Pan-Arabism: its conditional nature. One can only remain an Arab until one deviates from a vision of the "Arab nation" extending from the Atlantic to the Shatt-al-Arab. At the very least, this dynamic fails to acknowledge cultural differences among Arabs and, at the very worst, it admits of no dissent from dominant political dogmas...