Word: hamra
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...Damascus, the irony of his current plight is not lost on him. Last year, Wehbe, 26, joined thousands of his countrymen on the streets of Beirut to call for an end to Syria's domination of his homeland, and threw a heady, vodka-fueled "Liberation Festival" in his Hamra apartment when they officially withdrew. Then, last Thursday, the graphic designer, his parents and brother paid a cabdriver $2,500 to drive them out of Beirut to the heart of Syria, and safety...
...Back in Hamra, the formerly fashionable part of town that was home to Beirut's famed shopping district in the 1960s, things were quite different. Traffic was subdued but it was still there. Shops were open and people were in the streets going about their business. The owner of a hardware store told me that people were stocking up on batteries. He thought the war had nothing to do with Hizballah or Israel's security. According to him, this was a war for the hearts and minds of tourists. Once Israel destroyed Lebanon's entire infrastructure, that would...
When sabah aziz trudged past the police officers at the checkpoint outside Baghdad's al-Hamra hotel just before 7 a.m. on Jan. 19, he brushed off their invitation to stop for breakfast. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Aziz. People said he'd gone insane when his only son was executed for deserting Saddam Hussein's army. He walked out on his wife and daughter, roaming their suburb but never returning home. Locals cared for him, leaving out food and blankets. On this Wednesday morning, making his way between the blast barriers and "dragon's teeth" road spikes...
...concrete debris, bitumen wrenched from the road and shrapnel from what appeared to be artillery shells over a radius of three city blocks. It gouged a 2-m-deep, 8-m-wide crater into the street; the shock wave shattered windows streets away, including all those on the al-Hamra hotel's east side...
...Jadriyah road, facing the embassy, the garbage collector lay dead. Sabah's bloodied body was found by soldiers and identified by one of the police officers at the al-Hamra checkpoint. A hotel security guard took his body to the morgue and collected donations for his funeral. At least eight other civilians were wounded, including a 10-year-old boy who was rushed to hospital in the back of a police car, his face and arm gushing crimson. Behind their carefully positioned blast walls, sandbags and bunkers, the Australians survived; two were slightly wounded, but called home later to reassure...