Word: townes
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...booming, with gdp growth topping 6% last year, and unemployment finally beginning to fall. In time, economic growth, if it continues, may take the edge off the fear-based politics that has taken hold in Poland. Back in Ozarow, Grazyna Bialowas admits that since her beloved factory closed, the town has actually improved, with a Best Western hotel and several new factories springing up on the main street. There is even a new church. Bialowas is not as angry as she was, she concedes. But she's still voting...
...dusty mile or so from where a fellow platoon leader was recently killed by a powerful roadside bomb, Army 1st. Lt. James Vansandt piles out of a Humvee and sets out with his Iraqi translator into the darkness toward the crowded main street of Musayyib, a ramshackle Shi'ite town set along the Euphrates River some 40 miles south of Baghdad. Robed men are gathered in clusters on benches and around tables brought out after the daily ritual of breaking the 12-hour Ramadan fast. As his platoon fans out into the shadows on both sides of the road, Vansandt...
Vansandt and his men are risking a nighttime foot patrol through Musayyib to gauge local support of a recent program enlisting volunteers from the town and surrounding villages into ad hoc militias supported and paid by the U.S. military. When he asks the Iraqi men how security is in town, they all smile and nod and chat among themselves excitedly. "Good. Good. Already we to go to the peace," says Salih Ibrahim, 50, an art teacher who speaks rough English and who tries to translate questions from his friends. Ibrahim says one region to the east of town still swarms...
...climb back aboard their Humvees and roll slowly back through the town, which has already emptied save for donkeys and dogs and trash. Winding through the dust along the river bank toward their base, the soldiers pass through several Iraqi police checkpoints and then through one more where three young men had earlier stood wearing civilian clothes and carrying Kalashnikovs - the newest local squad of concerned citizens. "Wave and smile if you see 'em, guys," Vansandt tells his men. "They're on our side...
Seeing a window of opportunity in their own sector, officers quickly mobilized, taking cues from the Anbar program and redesigning it to fit local conditions, enlisting volunteers from the town of Musayyib and surrounding villages to be part of ad hoc militias supported and paid by the U.S. military. It's still a work in progress and sometimes dangerously clumsy. Members of the American battalion here recently shot and killed three of the new local volunteers at a checkpoint just north of town, saying they mistook them for insurgents planting roadside bombs...