Word: yasser
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the U.S. invaded Iraq four years ago, Yasser Obaid Hussein's life was full of peril - but his mind was filled with hope. Night after night, his modest Baghdad apartment was shaken by the U.S. "shock and awe" bombing campaign. His pregnant wife Sheherezad was worried that a cruise missile might crash through the window. To calm her and their three children, Yasser tried to stay positive. "If we survive the bombs," he recalls saying, "we will have a wonderful new life...
...smiles wanly, embarrassed now by that optimism. But how could he have known that the new life he was promising would expose his family to even greater danger and drive them out of the country? Yasser, who has been a loyal employee of Time's since the fall of Saddam Hussein, now keeps his family in Jordan, where they live among nearly 1 million other Iraqi exiles. His story mirrors Iraq's: a tale of hope and opportunity overwhelmed by terror and tragedy...
Saddam's fall brought joy to most Iraqis, but Yasser had additional reasons to celebrate. A few days after the regime's fall, Sheherezad gave birth to twin girls: Tabarek and Aya. There were complications. The babies were premature, and Tabarek was weak. Much of the pediatric hospital's life-support equipment was lost to the looting mobs that rampaged through Baghdad after the collapse of the old regime, so doctors had to rely on one old, malfunctioning incubator. Tabarek later developed learning difficulties that, her doctors believe, resulted in part from poor postnatal attention...
...seeds were planted by Yasser Arafat. When he ran the Palestinian Authority, Arafat's ruling philosophy involved playing numerous security forces against each other, so no single one could ever become too powerful. The result: several organizations, no clear hierarchy, a lot of guns and a lot of people with interests they want to protect. Hamas has its own forces, too, including its powerful Executive Force and the Izzadine al Qassam Brigades. Then there are other insurgent groups and numerous clans, gangs, and families with their own militias and interests, ranging from offering protection to taking revenge, from committing crimes...
...simplified the argument and blamed the Palestinian people for the irresponsibility of their political leaders.” Dershowitz opened the talk with a brief history of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, remarking that Carter was “responsible in part” for convincing the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to walk away from a deal that would have created two separate states in the region. “He’s the reason Palestine isn’t today a state,” Dershowitz said. Some of his harshest words came in response to a passage...