Word: shying
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...become the de facto leader of Egypt. A seasoned warrior despite his small stature and frailty, Saladin still had a tough hand to play. He was a Kurd (even then a drawback in Middle Eastern politics), and he was from Syria, a Sunni state, trying to rule Egypt, a Shi'ite country. But a masterly 17-year campaign employing diplomacy, the sword and great good fortune made him lord of Egypt, Syria and much of Mesopotamia. The lands bracketed the Crusader states, and their combined might made plausible Nur al-Din's dream of a Muslim-Christian showdown...
...plotted against Saddam before Clinton went public, is still picking up the pieces of its shattered operation. More than five years ago, the agency poured millions of dollars into a guerrilla force of the I.N.C., a loose coalition of Iraqi exile groups led by Ahmed Chalabi, a wealthy Iraqi Shi'ite and skillful political organizer. But with the White House nervous about being sucked into a contra-style insurgency war, the CIA pulled the plug on its support for Chalabi's guerrillas and turned to Iraqi officers in Saddam's inner circle who might topple him. That ended...
...coached, caressed and cajoled by the State Department. Last weekend 300 delegates from various Iraqi opposition groups gathered in New York City, where U.S. officials hoped they would finally lay aside their feuds and present a unified front. That didn't happen. The major group representing Iraq's southern Shi'ites, the Iran-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, didn't even show...
...confusion helps explain why Saddam seems to have grown comfortable with his situation. Though the Desert Fox air campaign last December rattled his regime, and though there have been outbreaks of violence among Shi'ites in southern Iraq and even Baghdad, his security services always ruthlessly stamp out dissent. The CIA still believes Saddam will be eliminated by someone in his inner circle, but intelligence agents don't see how a "silver bullet" would ever get close to him. He has multiple layers of security around him, never announces his travel plans ahead of time, sleeps in a different...
...real military training from Washington now. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (P.U.K.) and the other Kurdish faction in northern Iraq, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (K.D.P.), say they have 80,000 lightly armed fighters, while the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq claims a force of 20,000 Shi'ite soldiers who have been launching raids in the south. Chalabi wants to train about 500 exile intelligence operatives, who would first infiltrate Iraq. They would be followed by 5,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi guerrillas, who would seize territory under U.S. air cover and encourage demoralized Iraqi army units...