Word: zarqawi
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This morning, Pentagon halls are buzzing with the reverberations of the killing of terrorist leader Abu Mousab Al Zarqawi last night in an airstrike in Iraq. There is a huge-if brief-sense of relief about finally taking out the symbolic and logistical heart of the Iraqi insurgency. In part, that is because the small, covert, 12-man teams of U.S. special forces have been chasing Zarqawi for years. "Every time I heard somebody complain we hadn't got Zarqawi yet, I had to grit my teeth," said a Pentagon official, "because I knew we had multiple teams out every...
...Though details are still emerging, it appears Zarqawi was killed when two Air Force F-16s from Balad Air Base in Iraq were directed to the house where Zarqawi was and dropped precision weapons. At a briefing this morning from Iraq, a senior U.S. officer displayed a large picture of the face of Zarqawi's corpse, part of a high-profile p.r. effort to show that the al-Qaeda military leader, who just weeks ago relased his own video of himself shooting an automatic weapon, was indisputably dead. President George Bush jumped on the rare, high-profile military success...
...outbreak of insurgent violence in reaction to the news. Attacks in Iraq have already reached an all-time high of 700 per week, according to a State Department source, and officers are bracing for the scores of terrorist and criminal cells spread across Iraq to react to news of Zarqawi's killing. For the special forces troops, they are already moving on to the next target. In an exclusive interview with TIME recently, Lt. General Dell Dailey talked about how U.S. forces had tracked a terrorist from the Achille Lauro ship hijacking in 1980 to Iraq two years...
...allies' most dramatic victory in Iraq since Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003. He didn't allow himself a public grin until half an hour later, at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast. While Washington slept, Iraqis had announced that an American air strike had killed Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, who competed only with Osama bin Laden for the title of world's most wanted terrorist. Speaking live for six minutes on the network morning shows, the President said coalition and Iraqi forces had "persevered through years of near misses and false leads, and they never gave up." The congratulations...
...Zarqawi is dead," President Bush said this morning, "but the difficult and necessary mission in Iraq continues. We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him. We can expect the sectarian violence to continue. Yet the ideology of terror has lost one of its most visible and aggressive leaders." The President could afford to be muted because the magnitude of the victory was obvious. "We thought we were never going to catch a break," said a relieved Presidential adviser...