unbar

“A lot of them tried to escape. We didn’t really stop them. They managed to unbar the main gate and ran out into the road. There were a big ginger cat and a white owl waiting for them. Hell’s whiskers! I’ve never seen anything like it!”

The reason is not because great powers generally like to unbar the gates and hold a picnic in the honor of the previously excluded.”

During the insurgency that raged in Unbar following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, local tribes eventually rose up against al Qaeda and routed the group in what came to be known as the "Awakening".

But the Islamists have been regaining ground in Unbar over the past year, with the stated aim of creating a Sunni religious state straddling the border into Syria's rebel-held eastern desert provinces.

You must know that I lodge on a level with the street, in a room which was once a shop, so that if I unbar the shutters of my glass door, one step brings me into the middle of the street, and any one passing along, can put his head in at the window, and say good morning.