Word: conflicting
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...many Africans old enough to remember the Cold War, the bloody conflict currently unfolding in Somalia will be awfully familiar. Back before the Berlin Wall fell, localized power struggles all over the continent often turned into full-scale regional wars when the protagonists cast themselves, or were cast - however improbably - as torch-bearers for Washington or Moscow. Such association would bring boundless diplomatic and financial support, not to mention boatloads of weapons and other military assistance, enabling local strongmen to wage self-serving wars for years on end. There's no Cold War any longer, of course...
...been ruled by clan-based warlords who laid waste the country and turned Mogadishu into an anarchic, continuous battlefield. More than 100,000 people died in the fighting in 1991-92, and when the U.N. launched a massive relief operation in April 1992, the U.S. was drawn into the conflict - at first guarding the relief, then delivering it, then attacking the warlords that were stealing it. In October 1993, in events depicted in the film Black Hawk Down, Somali militiamen shot down a Blackhawk helicopter over Mogadishu and 18 U.S. servicemen were killed in the crash and subsequent rescue attempt...
...terror" prism conceals the complexity of a conflict based on clan, political and regional rivalries that, in some cases, date back to the 1960s. And regional analysts fear that the tension will be exacerbated rather than resolved by the responses of outside players...
...involvement of outside players, however, the Somali conflict remains a domestic power struggle at heart. It pits the Transitional Federal Government, a product of years of painstaking horse-trading among rival clan warlords, against the Council of Islamic Courts, a loose Islamist alliance strongly nationalist in character - which has vowed to break the power of the warlords and unite all of Somalia under Sharia law (although it happens to be led by clan rivals of the dominant clan in the government camp...
...light of the impact they would have on global oil prices, and therefore on the global economy as a whole. Indeed, world oil prices have begun to creep upwards since Saturday's sanctions resolution. Unlike North Korea, Iran also has leverage that can influence U.S. prospects in difficult conflict zones, i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan...