Word: asmara
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This week, TIME has learned, government forces-including thousands of militiamen redeployed from the Ogaden desert war against Somali insurgents-will try to regain control of a vital highway linking the Red Sea port of Massawa with the provincial capital of Asmara...
...today threatened with disintegration. Indeed, the two hottest wars going on anywhere in the world at present are both taking place within Ethiopia. In the northern province of Eritrea, Addis Ababa's Marxist military government of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam has lost everything but the provincial capital of Asmara and the port cities of Massawa and Assab to the secessionist rebels. If Ethiopia should be defeated in both of its desert wars, it would lose more than 40% of its territory, 6 million of its 28 million people, and its access...
...from rifles and machine guns to captured missiles and conventional antiaircraft guns. In the territory they control, the rebels run schools, clinics, plantations and even small factories. At present, they are engaged in an all-out offensive to capture what they do not yet control: the provincial capital of Asmara and four other cities and towns...
...Asmara, the city that Benito Mussolini called "the gem of the Horn of Africa," the Ethiopian army is increasingly nervous. The vital 56-mile highway to the port of Massawa, as well as all other roads, is frequently cut, if not actually controlled, by Eritrean forces. The railroad from the port of Assab carries no traffic; its bridges have been destroyed by guerrillas. Ethiopian army units dare not travel unescorted more than a few miles outside the capital. When they do go farther, they move by convoy with tank protection and air cover. Their supplies arrive only...
There are 150,000 Eritreans in Asmara, and every one is a potential saboteur-"our Trojan horse," says one Ethiopian commander, referring to the civilian population. Two weeks ago, the E.L.F. sent a radio message to its units inside Asmara advising them that buses were urgently needed to carry wounded soldiers to a field hospital. The response came 24 hours later: eight large Ethiopian buses were hijacked just after midnight, spirited out of the city and driven to an E.L.F. aid station 20 miles away...