Word: guerrillas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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American troops operating in the Samarra area are combing the countryside day by day in a counter-move against an expected influx of insurgent fighters, a shift expected in the wake of U.S. gains made against guerrilla forces in the neighboring provinces of Anbar and Diyala. U.S commanders say up to 80% of the insurgent leaders thought to be in Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province, fled ahead of the ongoing U.S. offensive there. And already signs are emerging that some of the insurgent leaders who've escaped the massive U.S. assault in Diyala have come here...
...news from the battle was good. That was no surprise: in a guerrilla war like Iraq, every engagement that can be described as a "battle" is inevitably won by the superior force, which is part of the frustration. Baquba, the capital of Diyala province just northeast of Baghdad, had been infiltrated by al-Qaeda over the past year-between 400 and 500 al-Qaeda fighters were estimated to be in the city when the U.S. forces attacked on Monday, and now those who remain are surrounded, in a slowly tightening cordon. These sorts of operations have taken place multiple times...
Since he began running his guerrilla campaign three months ago, Thompson has come a long way by playing hard to get. He has appealed to GOP voters not by campaigning but by intravenous means: filling in for Paul Harvey, writing for the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page, blogging. The idea has been to feed the hunger of conservatives who don't see much in the current field to admire--and then rise up to fill the void. Though still officially undeclared, Thompson gets about 12% of the vote in primary-poll matchups...
...Fatah al-Islam's roots can loosely be traced to Israel's 1948 war of independence, when thousands of Palestinians fled their homes for a dozen refugee camps in Lebanon. The squalid, overcrowded camps became breeding grounds for the Palestine Liberation Organization's guerrilla groups. After Israel's invasion in 1982, designed to evict the P.L.O. from Lebanon, the Syrian regime launched a campaign of its own against Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization, sponsoring a splinter group that called itself Fatah al-Intifada. That faction, backed by Syrian artillery, drove Arafat out of Tripoli...
...Fatah al-Islam is headed by Shaker al-Absi, a veteran Palestinian guerrilla fighter who is thought to have fought American forces in Iraq and was linked to Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed a year ago. In 2004, al-Absi was sentenced to death in absentia by a Jordanian court for the 2002 murder of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman. His group - thought to comprise 200-500 fighters drawn from several Arab countries - has recently begun establishing a presence in other refugee camps in Beirut and south Lebanon. Islamist sources...