Word: gunships
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...angry and frustrated at a costly mission gone wrong, even a dignified retreat is proving difficult to secure. Last week seven more service members died when their AC-130 gunship crashed off the Kenyan coast en route to Mogadishu. As the last American ground troops packed up for their departure this week, free-lance gunmen continued to take potshots at guard posts and passing convoys. Eight warships are deployed offshore should trouble erupt...
HELICOPTER GUNSHIP ATTACKS, GROUND RAIDS, more casualties -- the news from Somalia increasingly resembles reports from a war zone. To enforce a cease- fire between rival warlords, four rocket- and cannon-firing U.S. Cobra choppers teamed up with Belgian paratroopers to rout forces advancing on the southern port of Kismayu; reports had eight Somalis killed and about 40 wounded. On Saturday at dusk, 700 U.S. troops backed by helicopters swept into the crossroads town of Afgoi to flush out bandit gangs that have been ambushing supplies en route to the famine belt. Meanwhile, in Mogadishu, U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Anthony Botello...
...themselves spread thin, trying to answer a host of competing demands. Most of the capital's armed thugs crept away, but soldiers had yet to impose more than a veneer of security. On Saturday, U.S. combat helicopters destroyed three armed Somali vehicles that had opened fire on the American gunship. Relief workers groused about poor communications and stalled food shipments; more urgent were the calls for help from Good Samaritans trapped in their compounds in outlying towns where marauding gunmen were still stealing, fighting and killing. Somali clan leaders pitched hard for at least a yearlong commitment, and Somali children...
...Iraqi town of Safwan are appalling. "Iraqi troops sent a tank to knock down the door of the holy shrine of Najaf," recalls Hajj Hattin. "Then they began looting all the deserted homes. They shot people at random in front of the crowds." Hajj Mohammed remembers a helicopter gunship shooting at civilians in the streets of Najaf. Iraqi soldiers "went into schools to threaten small children into giving the names of relatives they could accuse of being rebels," he says. "If the child did not answer, they shot him and his family." Ahmed Ali still shudders at the memory...
Eleven Marines were killed in the fighting around Umm Hujul, the first known American battle dead of the war (a number of flyers have been listed as missing in action). An AC-130 gunship with a crew of 14 was shot down over Kuwait, and a male and a female soldier on a "transport mission" near Khafji were missing. The woman, Army Specialist Melissa Rathbun-Nealy, might be the first female American soldier ever to become a POW (though some nurses have been captured in previous wars...