Quote of the Year 2014 Already Announced, Regards Falluja

Sunday Jan 5, 2014, on page A-10 of the New York Times, I read the quote of the year. Yes, as of now, 358 days remain in 2014 to top this quote, but it won't happen.

To make it more impressive as a great quote, it was a kicker, the end of a story, the last line of a journalism piece  I don't know if they call it a "kicker" in other writing forms, novels, screenplays. If so, then "Nobody's perfect" was the kicker of "Some Like It Hot".

So the kicker quote comes from Fallujah, the defiant city of Iraq's Anbar Province. Nearly a decade ago  Fallujah became the symbolic front line  of the Iraqi insurgency when on March 31, 2004 four American security contractors from Blackwater were killed there, their corpses burnt and two of the bodies hung across the Euphrates River for the world to gasp.

Two intense battles later, the  U.S. Marines took over the city in November, 2004 and the Iraqi government had it under relative control for nearly a decade. Then, the first week of 2014, it was announced that Fallujah was no longer in control of the Iraqi government but split between militant factions; including the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) and militias of Sunni tribes

The Jan. 5. Times article has the bylines of  Yasir Ghazi (from Baghdad) and Tim Arango ( from Istanbul). But, an unnamed NYT correspondent "reporting from Anbar Province" had to get the quote of the year.

Here's the two last paragraphs of the story :

"A heavy firefight also erupted on the main highway linking Baghdad and Anbar, with fighters taking three tanks and other military vehicles, according to police.

"The fighters, though, apparently did not know how to use the tanks, and got out a call over a mosque's loudspeaker. "If anybody knows how to drive a tank. please come to the mosque."  

Top that.