Word: aidid
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Mohammed Hussein Farah Aidid is still getting used to his transformation from warlord to Somalia's Deputy Prime Minister. But his assessment of the precarious hold the new government has on Somalia, after ousting an Islamist regime, is both candid and grim. "The institutions of the T.F.G. [Transitional Federal Government] are very weak," he said in interview with TIME at his villa in Mogadishu. "It's a symbolic government. Permanence we do not have. We do not have institutions; we do not have a credible force. Unless [we receive outside assistance] quickly, we have no chance of building a nation...
...Somalis cannot remember a time when they felt safer. For Americans, the single, searing image of Somalia was formed in October 1993, after two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters--part of a U.S. mission to provide humanitarian relief and restore order--were felled by militias loyal to warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. Eighteen U.S. special forces were killed, and the world community's involvement in Somalia effectively ended. What followed was a decade and a half of intermittent war that reduced Mogadishu to rubble. Along the "green line," the architectural gem of the former Italian colony that bore the brunt...
...Qaeda, initiated the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, a covert program that funneled aid to warlords in return for their assistance in capturing suspected terrorists. One of those warlords approached by U.S. operatives was Osman Hassan Ali Atto. Once a top financier of warlord Aidid--Atto was captured just a week before the downing of the Black Hawks in 1993--he is the last independent warlord in Mogadishu, a testament to his ability to play both sides of the net. Blunt-spoken and avuncular, Atto disparaged the U.S. cash-for-warlords program. "It was a waste...
MOHAMMED FARRAH AIDID From fugitive to victor over the U.S., the Somali clan leader returns from hiding more powerful than ever...
...Somali militiamen. On Oct. 3, 1993, a team of U.S. special operations soldiers—mainly from Delta Force and the Army Rangers—was airdropped into the city’s volatile Bakara Market neighborhood. Their assignment: to capture two prominent lieutenants of Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. What followed was, as Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden notes, “the longest sustained firefight involving U.S. troops since Vietnam...