Word: mig
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Oueddei and the French-backed Habré. The struggle continued off and on, killing thousands and ravaging the country's riverside capital of N'Djamena, until November 1980, when Gaddafi dispatched to Chad a contingent of 4,000 troops, complete with tanks, rocket launchers, mortars, helicopters and MiG-25 fighters, to support Oueddei. Habré quickly agreed to a cease-fire and fled. Gaddafi, who dreams of creating a sub-Saharan Islamic republic from Senegal on the Atlantic to the Sudan on the Red Sea, announced a month later that Libya would "merge" with its southern neighbor...
...lead to a new type of dependency as they become impoverished pawns in the superpower struggle. Weapons shipments tend to promote regional arms races (India and Pakistan, for example), with the ante raised every time a more advanced item of technology, such as the F-16 jet or the MiG-25, is introduced into a region. Says House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Clement Zablocki: "Reagan's new policy could result in destabilizing arms races in sensitive areas of the world." If only in financial terms, the Third World can ill afford it: the aggregate debt of developing nations has doubled...
...bizarre showcase for all this lethal hardware is the 13-month-old Persian Gulf conflict. Iraq has been using Soviet MiG jets, French Mirage jets, Brazilian Urutu armored personnel carriers, and Soviet T-72 tanks to fight Iran's American F-4 jets, British Chieftain tanks and Italian-built Chinook helicopters. "The Iran-Iraq arms buildup is a classic case of internal pressures and external fears combining to produce a disaster," says a diplomat who has served in both countries...
Libya is Moscow's biggest, and most conspicuous, Third World client. On a visit to the Soviet capital this spring, Gaddafi ordered supplies for the jets that have been bombing the Sudanese border villages. New MiG-25 and Sukhoi Su-20 fighter planes were delivered earlier this year to Tripoli, where the docks are dotted with unopened crates of Soviet arms. Another major Soviet client is Syria. Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass visited Moscow last month to meet with his Soviet counterpart, Dmitri Ustinov, and the country's top weapons designers. Tlass discussed the purchase of more MiG...
...main mosque on the bank of the Kabul River, the faithful gather for midday prayers. Most are old men, many of them crippled. In the midst of their worship, the droning incantations from the loudspeakers on the minarets are momentarily drowned out by the roar of two camouflaged MiG-21s streaking toward targets upcountry. Outside, a truck goes by with two Soviet soldiers in the back. They wear wide-brimmed khaki ranger hats and olive-drab bulletproof vests, and they hold their Kalashnikov assault rifles at the ready, barrels upright, on their knees...