Word: stronghold
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...race, perhaps lieutenant governor Mitch Landrieu, a Democrat and younger brother of U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu. He lost a bid to replace New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin last year. But the state's scrambled demographics could complicate matters: Hurricane Katrina cut the population of New Orleans, a Democratic stronghold, by half. And while many of those voters, mostly African-American, have resettled elsewhere in Louisiana, the dispersal will make it harder for Democrats to cobble together the coalition of black and Cajun votes that have traditionally helped them squeak by in statewide races...
...military officials also believe Muqtada al-Sadr, the rabble-rousing militant who is also a crucial political ally of al-Maliki, has gone to ground in Iran during the first weeks of the surge. And there were no major confrontations even when U.S. and Iraqi forces entered the militia stronghold of Sadr City...
...court-martial, however, is unlikely to answer another question: whether the men were killed because superior officers had, in essence, suggested that no military-age Iraqi men should be left alive in the raid of what was believed to be an insurgent stronghold. The defense has been complicated by the fact that the commanding officer, 3rd Brigade Commander Col. Michael Steele, will not testify at the trial. Col. Steele gained recognition for heroism in Somalia in 1993, actions later depicted in the book and movie Black Hawk Down...
...Sadr City, the giant Baghdad slum that is his stronghold, there is confusion about his whereabouts. A group of supporters said they met him in Najaf as recently as last week. ?He told us, 'I would rather die here than flee,'? said one resident who was part of that group. But other Sadr City residents say they have heard that Sadr is out of the country, exact location unknown. The main Shi'ite radio station broadcasting from Sadr City has studiously avoided the subject...
...Taliban's traditional stronghold in the south--where Noorzai's tribe lives--the radical Islamic group is actively encouraging poppy cultivation on a grand scale, a dramatic shift from its days in power when its puritanical tenets forbade drugs and drug trafficking. Why the change? As a Western diplomat in Kabul puts it, "It takes money to fund an insurgency." Of the $3 billion earned last year by Afghan narcotraffickers, roughly $800 million trickles down to the Afghan farmers who grow the crop. According to a senior Western official in Kabul, a small portion of that sum is "more than...