Word: mauritania
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Water wells are miles apart. Under the blistering sun, the temperature of the sand often reaches 180° F. Despite these forbidding conditions, foreigners have lately been scurrying in and out of the West African republic of Mauritania, at the western end of the Sahara -hiring the few available trucks, renting plots of land and even booking rooms in an old French Foreign Legion post. Told that the strangers are there to watch the moon black out the sun, some believers in the oasis town of Chinguetti-the seventh holiest city of Islam-are incredulous. "How can you tell...
...main U.S. scientific contingent, consisting of some 100 observers from two dozen universities and other institutions, will be divided into two camps, on opposite sides of Africa. The smaller group will set up its instruments in Mauritania, where the hot dry air should offer good viewing. But because Mauritania has experienced a severe drought for the past few years, sudden winds could blow up obscuring clouds of dust particles. Scientists are hedging their bets by establishing another camp on Kenya's Lake Rudolf, near Loiyengalani. Even more primitive than some of the sites in Mauritania, the village is accessible...
Along sandy roads in neighboring Mauritania, the skeletons of hundreds of cattle bake in the sun, picked nearly clean by vultures. Hundreds of other cattle, sheep and goats lie on the parched sand, eyes glassy and ribs protruding, too weak to move. Soon they also will die. In Senegal, desert herdsmen, short of water and grazing land, are driving their scrawny herds to Dakar in a desperate effort to sell the animals before they die. The price for cows these days is as low as $3 a head...
...last winter Morocco's King Hassan II and his trusted lieutenant, General Mohammed Oufkir, were in the seaside resort of Agadir, discussing an official visit by Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to nearby Mauritania. To the King's astonishment, Oufkir suddenly proposed that the Moroccan air force be used to assassinate Gaddafi, who had never made any secret of his antipathy toward Hassan. "If only we could find out Gaddafi's flight plan," asked Oufkir, "what would you think of sending an F-5 to smash into him in the middle of the desert...
Other Africans besides Amin are also beholden to Gaddafi. Libya is arming and training Moslem separatists in neighboring Chad and sending weapons to Eritrean rebels fighting Haile Selassie ("a lackey of Israel"). It has supplied guns to Guinea and money to Upper Volta, Mauritania and Niger. Libya also provides yearly subsidies of $125 million to Egypt and $45 million to Syria, with which it is joined in a new Federation of Arab Republics, and is a principal financial angel of the Palestinian guerrilla movement. More than 300 Libyan soldiers are serving with the fedayeen; five of them were killed...