There is no discernible starting line and the finish 100m away is just a scratch in the sand. The track is rock hard and unforgiving; no serious athlete would consider running here. But for decades the al-Kishafa stadium in Baghdad has been the training ground of Iraq’s athletic champions, and Ala’a Hekmet, a charming, intensely focused 18-year-old, is its latest star.
Under the lazy afternoon sun, a dozen men stood guard this week inside the coiled barbed-wire fence that surrounds the police station in Kufa, near the holy city of Najaf. They were well-armed, most carrying Kalashnikovs, one a sniper’s rifle with another two hand grenades tucked into his vest, but not one was a policeman.
At least 22 people were killed and as many as 200 injured on Sunday in a three-hour gun battle between coalition troops from the United States, Spain and El Salvador and thousands of Iraqi protesters loyal to a firebrand Shia cleric.
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/ 28 November 2003
The US military has not punished any soldier for shooting an unarmed civilian and refuses even to keep count of the civilians its soldiers kill. Yet for several months now, US officers have been quietly paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to relatives of the dead and injured, offering polite but carefully worded condolences and promising investigations that lead nowhere.
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/ 14 November 2003
The unscheduled summit in Washington over the future of Iraq reflected intense White House unease about the way the situation is unravelling in the country. In private, American and British officials in the CPA can barely disguise their disappointment at a body that has been criticised for tardiness and inefficiency.
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/ 13 October 2003
A suicide car bomber killed six Iraqis on Sunday in a huge explosion at one of Baghdad’s most heavily guarded hotels where CIA teams, American contractors and senior Iraqi officials were staying. The lunchtime blast was the latest in a series of devastating bombings over the past six months that have claimed nearly 200 lives, most of them Iraqi civilians.
Iraq’s governing council believes it will take many months to draw up a Constitution before power can be handed over to an Iraqi government through a general election. The warning will come as a challenge to the US administration, currently under pressure from foreign critics to transfer power swiftly to a local administration.
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/ 26 September 2003
Iraq’s finance minister unveiled sweeping investment laws last week to give foreign companies unprecedented access to the Iraqi firms that are to be sold off in a privatisation windfall. Under the new rules, foreign firms will have the right to wholly own Iraqi companies, except those in the oil, gas and mineral industries.
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/ 24 September 2003
It has become one of the most serious hurdles in the United States’s project to reshape Iraq: how can a force that spent billions sending its troops to war still not manage to keep the lights on? Bombings, sanctions and looting have kept Iraq in the dark.
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/ 4 September 2003
Early in March intelligence agents searching the western deserts of Pakistan thought they had finally tracked down the world’s most wanted man. They were wrong. And they are still in the dark as to the whereabouts of Al-Qaeda’s leader, now believed to be in northern Pakistan guarded by a ring of tribesmen.