Word: alis
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...Ali: I was very angry with the militias. I decided to go to the training camps because I was tired of being robbed at roadblocks. At that time, before the Courts came to power, you could see someone kill a friend of yours, you could see a friend of yours robbed, the situation was as bad as that. The Shabab were good people. They trained you to defend your people ... . There were reserve troops and frontline troops. And after 2004, we fought against the warlords and thankfully we were successful...
...Said Ali, 21, is a volunteer fighter for the Shabab militia, the feared enforcers of the Islamic Courts Union. The U.S. brands the organization as an ally of al-Qaeda; in reality, it is also a nationalist anti-warlord movement that contains many Muslim moderates and has no international ambitions. He was 11 when he left his village in southern Somalia and traveled to Mogadishu to look for an education. But all public education had collapsed with the last functioning government in 1991, leaving private school the only option. And Said Ali, like most of his generation, was unable...
...country in a lightning advance, cornering the Islamists in a small, deeply forested area in the southeast of the country, against the Kenyan border. The Islamists are said to contain scores of foreign jihadist fighters from across the Middle East and South Asia, including - Somali Prime Minister, Ali Mohammed Gedi, recently said - three men the U.S. suspects of being behind the bomb attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed more than 250 people...
...Maliki from his key patron - Sadr, whose militia is in the thick of much of the sectarian violence - or else persuade Shi'ite rivals such as Abdulaziz al-Hakim to form a new coalition with the Sunnis and Kurds, excluding Maliki and Sadr, appear to be floundering. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the supreme Shi'ite spiritual leader whose expressed will neither Maliki nor Hakim can cross, has made clear that he will not tolerate any moves that break the unity of the ruling Shi'ite coalition that includes Maliki, Hakim and Sadr...
...government, winning the war is only the first step toward reviving a failed state. Aidid, Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi and President Yusuf Abdullai recognize that the new government cannot succeed without disarmament, and an effort to be as inclusive as possible. "We will reconcile with the Islamists, "says Aidid. "All their remnants can join our forces." Both are daunting tasks. Some warlords have already dismissed the new government as a paper authority that will cease to have muscle - and therefore a point - once Ethiopia withdraws its forces. And on Tuesday, Gedi's attempt to persuade Somalis to disarm voluntarily...