Word: mogadishu
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...moonlight, their faces blackened with camouflage paint, their bodies braced for confrontation, they were met and blinded by the glare of television lights. But the farcical aspect of the first live military landing soon faded as the troops fanned out from their beachhead into the anarchic city of Mogadishu. By daylight, the airport was secured, the city port occupied, and for the first time in two years, most of the firepower belonged to friendlies. Though it had barely begun, the U.S. operation had already raised great expectations among Somalis that peace might actually come to a starving land that...
...reality, as always, is different from, and harder than, what military planners imagined. Washington is already enlarging the political scope of the U.S. mission. Before the first troops landed, Robert Oakley, the U.S. special envoy, held a series of meetings in Mogadishu that resulted in reports that he had no intention of entering into negotiations with Somalia's warlords, but would simply inform them of U.S. military aims and lay down a deadline to withdraw their gunmen. By Friday, Oakley had brokered a temporary reconciliation between the country's two most powerful clan leaders, General Mohammed Farrah Aidid...
...abundance of weapons. Order cannot be restored permanently until the country's thugs are separated from their sophisticated caches of weapons, which range from AK-47s to surface-to-air missiles and technicals, the Mad Max vehicles mounted with heavy machine guns and antiaircraft weapons. Residents do not mistake Mogadishu's relative calm for peace; they know that the thugs have simply redeployed to the bush...
...Meanwhile, the gung-ho attempt of some of the vanguard troops to seize weapons slowed perceptibly. French troops initially searched Somali cars for weapons; by week's end they were searching only for the heavy guns that used to be carried on technicals. "It would be inconceivable to disarm Mogadishu," said a senior French army officer...
...real work of bringing food to starving people has barely begun. On Saturday, the U.S. escorted its first food convoy, a group of four trucks that delivered its cargo to northern Mogadishu. American helicopter gunships and armored personnel carriers escorted the shipment, which had been idled in port for several days, reportedly because of a disagreement between U.S. troops and U.N. peacekeepers over who was in charge. Other relief shipments remained blocked in the city, in large part the result of bad communications between soldiers and relief workers...