Strategic Value
Between 2004 and June 2007, Al Qaida in Iraq and Shi'ite militias used locations in the Baghdad Belts to supply their combat operations in the capital. According to General Odierno, a top US commander in Iraq, "“Attacks occurring in Baghdad often originate in these outerlying regions." In 2006, US forces captured a map hand-drawn by then-al Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab Al Zarqawi which showed Al Qaida placed a high priority on controlling the belts as a means of transporting weapons and fighters as well as providing bases in which to construct bomb-making factories.
Read more about this topic: Baghdad Belts, Iraq War 2003-
Famous quotes containing the word strategic:
“If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamics that present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“The strategic adversary is fascism ... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
—Michel Foucault (1926–1984)