Word: tikrit
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...Word of yesterday's deadly assault in eastern Diyala Province spread quickly among U.S. troops as far away as the western city of Tikrit, where soldiers with the 82nd Airborne kept a close watch on reports of their comrades sent to the Baqubah area to deal with rising violence there. The strike was what U.S. soldiers call a complex attack, one involving elaborate planning to maximize casualties. Initial assessments suggest that first a suicide car bomber rammed a vehicle into the gates of a small U.S. patrol base outside Baquba in the same area where single car bomber attacked...
...closest he came to emulating one of his heroes was in an area over which he had no control: like Saladin, he was born just outside Tikrit, an ancient town in Iraq's dusty central plains. Saddam's rise was due in part to his effectiveness as an administrator. After becoming Vice President of Iraq in 1969, at 32, he nationalized the country's oil industry and used the revenues to launch a massive program to modernize the country's infrastructure: roads, bridges, factories, universities, hospitals. By the late 1970s, Iraq was the Middle East's most progressive state--rich...
Less than two months later, Saddam was gone. By the end of 2003, when he was caught near his native Tikrit, his military and political networks had been dismantled, his ubiquitous statues and portraits had disappeared. His ruthless sons Uday and Qusay had been killed. The republic of fear had been destroyed. And Saddam's prospects of becoming one of history's greats--hero or villain--were dashed. Nebuchadnezzar, Hammurabi and Saladin had never cowered in a spider hole...
Saddam Hussein may have lost his life today. But he really died on Dec. 13, 2003. That was the day he was found by U.S. forces, hiding in a hole on a relative's farm outside his hometown of Tikrit. No one in Iraq had ever seen him more vulnerable. There he was, shown on television, dirt smeared on his face, his beard unkempt, his thick head of hair matted and graying. I watched these scenes unfold in Baghdad with my friend Omar, who chuckled when he saw a doctor shining a flashlight in Saddam's open mouth. It reminded...
...himself as a modern heir to Mesopotamian kings like Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi was born on April 28, 1937, on the banks of the Tigris in the hardscrabble village of Owja, just south of Tikrit. Saddam never knew his father, a shepherd, who disappeared six months before he was born. He was raised alternately by his mother and his uncle, a fervent Iraqi nationalist and an early supporter of the Iraqi Baath party who had an early ideological influence on the ambitious young Saddam. It may have influenced his mother's choice of a name for the child: Saddam means...