Word: troop
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wounds of that pogrom are still fresh. As Abdi talks, a troop of crippled young Somali men arrive. One has a cast on his left forearm, the bone shattered by a bullet; another is on crutches, his right leg amputated after a knee-capping; a third lost his left eye. Abdi's room feels like a field hospital. But it was to escape such horrors - militiamen had killed their mother and another brother on their farm outside Baidoa - that Abdi and his brother left in 2004. "We chose South Africa for a better life," he says. "We came here...
...Ambassador Ryan Crocker. "I hear we're gone on September 30th," he told Crocker. But Crocker joked back with a zinger, "What's wrong with Sept. 15th?" That's the day when General David Petraeus and Crocker are slated to report to Congress on the effectiveness of the troop surge. The Administration is then expected to unveil a list of tactical shifts on Iraq. Still, given Maliki's skills - one might even say his irreplacability - even that deadline may not involve Maliki leaving office...
...Broken Army clock, the service timeline for an exhausted force. Petraeus and his staff were deeply concerned when rumors of another tour extension, from the current 15 months for soldiers, spread in mid-June. "It would be a last resort," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters - but troop morale is so iffy that Petraeus quietly urged his commanders to "get the word out" to their soldiers that the extension rumors were false...
...According to the Broken Army clock, troop levels will begin to wane in March 2008, no matter what Congress decides in September; the current 20 brigade combat teams will be reduced to 15 by August 2008. There is growing speculation in the military that Bush will try to pre-empt the Petraeus testimony by announcing a gradual drawdown from 20 to 15 combat brigades later this summer. "As if that isn't going to happen anyway," a senior officer told me. "But it may give us some political breathing space" - that is, it may subvert the Democrats' calls...
...Analysts suspect that the rocket attack last week and the deadly suicide bombing threatens to revive the traditionally volatile Lebanon-Israel border as a theater of conflict. UNIFIL's leading troop contributing nations are France, Italy and Spain. The three powerful European countries agreed last summer to provide the military backbone to a beefed up UNIFIL. But that resolve will likely wane fast if their soldiers find themselves under regular attack in south Lebanon...