Word: stronghold
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...blunt: the U.S. military campaign to stabilize Iraq has failed. We have lost control of Anbar province, the Sunni stronghold. We are losing the battle for Baghdad. Muqtada al-Sadr's militia has taken control in several predominantly Shi'ite provinces. The government in Baghdad is near collapse. Sadr's support is the only real power base that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has left. If the political equation isn't changed soon, it is likely that Sadr will emerge as the de jure leader of Shi'ite Iraq. This will certainly lead to a full-scale civil...
...Over the past 10 days more than 2,000 U.S. soldiers and 1,000 Iraqi security forces have been searching neighborhoods east of the Tigris River in Baghdad for al-Taie. U.S. troops cordoned off the Mahdi Army stronghold of Sadr City in the search before Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told commanders he wanted the roadblocks taken down Tuesday. The top American military spokesman in Iraq Major General William Caldwell said Thursday that one U.S. soldier had been killed during the search and eight wounded. Caldwell added that the U.S. has "credible intelligence" on who is behind the kidnapping...
Last Saturday, Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to one of his aides, warned the U.S. ambassador that he was "not America's man in Iraq." On Tuesday he drove home the point, ordering an end to the U.S. military cordon around the Baghdad Shi'ite stronghold of Sadr City - a demand with which the U.S. military complied. Although U.S. troops don't take orders from the Iraqi government, refusing to heed the writ of that democratically elected government would make the U.S. military presence in that country untenable. The U.S. did point out that it had been...
...scene of the shooting, Americans who know the area had little doubt over who was responsible. Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, is increasingly active in Washash, which some U.S. troops now call Little Sadr City. Sutton believes they are working to make Washash a Mahdi Army stronghold west of the Tigris. Until now, the militia's base in the capital has been Sadr City on the east bank of the river, a sprawling slum that houses some 2.5 million Shi'ites. The Mahdi Army's expansion across the river complicates the efforts of U.S. forces to quell sectarian violence...
...year later, with Fallujah turning into a stronghold of the insurgency and gun battles breaking out on their street almost every day, the family moved again--this time to Ramadi, the capital of the restive Anbar province. Ramadi soon went the way of Fallujah, its streets controlled by jihadist gangs fighting pitched battles with U.S. Marines. One day an extremist cleric visited Waddah's home and urged the four brothers to join the holy war against the Americans. When the brothers refused, the cleric threatened to let loose his fighters on the family. The only way out was to move...