Operation Desert Shield was a 2006 operation by the Iraqi insurgency and al-Qaeda in Iraq, planned in December 2005 as a push against American forces during the Iraq War. The goal was to destabilize the American foothold in the Anbar province over the course of six months.
The planning of the operation wasn't discovered by the Americans until documents captured after the death of Faris Abu Azzam were finally translated, and revealed the details of the operation. The army said the documents surprised them, showing that the insurgents had a "pretty robust command and control system".
Famous quotes containing the words operation, desert and/or shield:
“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of “Wut,” is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)
“The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced: yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which beginning and imperfect Nature suspended there. Still hangs her wrinkled trophy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)