Word: jijiga
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...week's end the Ethiopians were reported to have swept 20 miles to Babile and taken positions to the south and east of Jijiga, from which they had been driven last August. The Somalis admitted that their forces in the Ogaden were in a "tactical retreat," and on Thursday the Mogadishu government called for general mobilization "in the face of a threatened Ethiopian invasion...
...guerrillas presently control all of the Ogaden, except the important towns of Harar and Dire Dawa (see map). In late August they ended a 15-day siege of the town of Jijiga (pop. 4,000) with a final push that sent 4,000 mutinous Ethiopian troops scurrying off through the nearby Marda Pass. The fighting zone is now more than 50 miles away, but dust-blown little Jijiga is not yet out of enemy range, as Correspondent Wood discovered on his visit there. "Without warning," he reports, "three Ethiopian jets suddenly screamed over the town, pumping rockets and bombs into...
...Somali hatred for the Ethiopians could hardly be more intense. Husein Liban, a Jijiga elder, recalls how the Somali nomads once killed an Ethiopian policeman who tried to collect a tax that they regarded as unfair. In revenge, he recalls, they "took 35 of our people and shot them. They would cut the breasts of our women to prevent them from suckling our young. When the fighting increased, the Ethiopians took 150 of our people as hostages. They shot them all, including my brother Odowa." Liban proudly claims to have been a guerrilla for 31 of his 71 years. "There...
...were allowed to observe the desert combat at first hand, Somalia's Radio Mogadishu reported that guerrillas of an organization known as the Western Somali Liberation Front had captured as much as 90% of the Ogaden-all, in fact, except the Ethiopian strongholds of Dire Dawa, Harar and Jijiga, where fighting was raging...
First, a band of 300 Somali shiftas (bandits) slipped across the border and shot up the Ethiopian crossroads town of Jijiga. Then the Ethiopians, after scanning the 30 bodies their troops had cut down, claimed that the raiders were led by a uniformed Somali army officer. Haile Selassie's Cabinet declared a state of emergency, claiming that 2,000 Somali regulars had crossed the border. Somalia alerted its own army, reported that eight Ethiopian armored cars had been destroyed in the border fight. By week's end both sides had called a "cease-fire," but the problem...