Word: najaf
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...chaotic days after the fall of Saddam, al-Zarqawi began to build a terrorist network by luring foreign jihadis to Iraq. He pulled off his first two spectacular attacks with the August 2003 bombings of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf...
Iraqis weren't waiting. Most seem just to want their country back, from the insurgents and from the Americans. In the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, locals drove around as if the entire town were taking part in a wedding procession, putting flowers on their cars and thrusting guns into the air. Mohammed Kareem, 36, spoke of a simple hope--"to live a peaceful life." Despite al-Zarqawi's death, that aspiration, as even President Bush would concede, may take years to achieve. The challenge for Bush is to convince Americans as well as Iraqis like Kareem that patience...
...understand just how brutal the war in Iraq has become, spend a day at work with Sheik Jamal al-Sudani. A Baghdad mortician, he travels to the holy city of Najaf every Friday to bury the capital's unclaimed and unknown dead--the scores of bodies that turn up every day, bearing no identifying characteristics save the method by which they were murdered. On a typical trip to the Wadi al-Salaam cemetery last month, Sheik Jamal and a small band of volunteers unload the grim cargo they have brought 100 miles from the Iraqi capital in an old flatbed...
Money is only one of his problems. The Friday trips to Najaf are fraught with danger. The road from Baghdad runs through some of the most lawless parts of Iraq, where criminals routinely kill commuters to take their cars and terrorists have been known to attack funeral corteges. Sheik Jamal says his weekly convoy--one truck and several carloads of volunteers--has never been attacked, a fact he attributes to divine intervention. "It's God's work, and he finds a way for us to do it," he says...
...Blow by Blow In the summer of 2003, al-Zarqawi?s group, al-Tawhid wal-Jihad launches a deadly suicide-bombing campaign in Iraq, including attacks on the U.N. compound in Baghdad, killing 22, and the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, killing about...