Word: baidoa
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...sign a peace deal with some moderate Islamists in June. The President then tried to fire the Prime Minister, a move that was rejected by parliament. Pressure had been building for months for Yusuf to step down, and the infighting between government officials (whose power extends to one town - Baidoa - and a few square feet of Mogadishu) looked like the last straw. "President Abdullahi Yusuf has marginalized large parts of the population and exacerbated divisions," think tank International Crisis Group wrote in a recent report. "The latest confrontation with parliament and the Prime Minister has underlined that Yusuf hampers...
...recent days, al-Shabaab have all but surrounded Mogadishu and appear poised to launch a new offensive at any time. The transitional government of President Yusuf, set up and backed by Ethiopian troops, has been confined to the town of Baidoa and a tiny wedge of Mogadishu. And the transitional administration seems dead set on emphasizing its transitoriness with infighting. Yusuf's firing of Hussein was dubious at best because the government's charter states that the President needs parliament's approval for such a move. Indeed, the parliament returned to back Hussein by a vote...
...shattered by a bullet; another is on crutches, his right leg amputated after a knee-capping; a third lost his left eye. Abdi's room feels like a field hospital. But it was to escape such horrors - militiamen had killed their mother and another brother on their farm outside Baidoa - that Abdi and his brother left in 2004. "We chose South Africa for a better life," he says. "We came here for peace. But we got a war worse than Somalia...
...position was at the front. Our plan was to sandwich the Transitional Federal Government [T.F.G.] at their base in Baidoa [in southwest Somalia]. But then the Ethiopians crossed the border behind us. We fought them, but there were bad people helping us, gangsters and thugs, there was misinformation, and this caused our defeat...
...Somali citizenry. Although Ethiopia promises to withdraw its forces within days, they had been active in Somalia for months before their presence was officially acknowledged, and a speedy withdrawal would leave a vacuum that the Islamists would once again fill. Yet having effectively repelled an Islamist advance on Baidoa, the Ethiopians risk losing much of their tactical advantage if they tried to capture Islamist strongholds, particularly the capital. Their goal, instead, according to Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, is to weaken the Islamists militarily in order to force them to negotiate with the government from a weaker position...