Word: mbarara
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...rapid collapse of Amin's rule began a week ago when long-range Tanzanian artillery pounded Mbarara and Masaka, garrison towns held by what were supposed to be Amin's elite forces, the Suicide Regiment and the Simba (Lion) Battalion. These troops not only surrendered; some even joined the anti-Amin forces. Late last week Tanzanian units and various anti-Amin groups began pushing north of Masaka toward Kampala, 80 miles away. But a Ugandan tank force managed to retake the garrison town of Tororo, near the Kenyan border, which had briefly fallen to the rebels...
Since October, the Tanzanians have shot down 18 of Amin's 26 combat aircraft, and in one recent week captured a Soviet T-55 tank, seven armored cars and other equipment. Some Ugandan army units based at Masaka and nearby Mbarara are reported to be in rebellion. Says a Western diplomat in Nairobi, capital of neighboring Kenya: "It looks as if Amin has abandoned all of southern Uganda...
...Tucker Lwanage, chief librarian at Makerere University. A student who fled after his uncle was seized by police said he had heard that between 1,000 and 1,500 Lango and Acholi soldiers had been killed in recent skirmishes at army barracks in the towns of Mubende and Mbarara. Except for the President's own tiny Kakwa tribe, said another, "I don't think there is a family in Uganda that has not lost someone...
Fifty miles to the west, a third column, its men dressed in civilian clothes, crossed the border in chartered buses. After a stiff fight at the border town of Kikagati, they headed on to Mbarara, where they stormed the garrison of Uganda's 1,000-man Simba Battalion and, aided by some dissidents who switched allegiances, succeeded in driving the loyalist troops out-but only for the moment...
...hostilities claimed the life of one American: Peace Corps Volunteer Louis Morton, 23, a schoolteacher from Houston, who had been driving with another Peace Corpsman, Robert Freed, along the road between Mbarara and Masaka on a game-spotting tour of nearby Queen Elizabeth National Park. They were unaware of the fighting until they ran into an army roadblock. According to Freed, the troops waved them through and then fired at them. Morton was killed instantly. Freed was taken prisoner but eventually set free...
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