Word: mogadishu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...dragged the bodies of two U.S. soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. The soldiers had been killed in an intense street battle that was later immortalized in the book Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden. But soon after the firefight, U.S. troops were withdrawn from Somalia, and other places--Afghanistan, Iraq--became known as locations where young American soldiers risked their lives...
...MOGADISHU, SOMALIA...
...That hope has now evaporated. In October, the T.F.G.'s inability to rise above tribal rivalries was laid bare when internal feuds culminated in President Yusuf Abdullah's firing of his Prime Minister, Ali Mohammed Gedi. This month, fighting between Ethiopian troops and Somali insurgents again erupted in Mogadishu, prompting tens more thousands of refugees to desert the capital. In scenes reminiscent of the 1993 battle between U.S. troops and a Somali militia, the bodies of two dead Ethiopian soldiers were dragged through the streets...
...Most important for the U.S., Somalia has wider international ramifications for terrorism. It has been a home to al-Qaeda-funded Islamist radicals since the early 1990s. The Ethiopians invaded to topple the Union of Islamic Courts (U.I.C.), which had ruled Mogadishu for six months and whose leader declared a jihad on Ethiopian troops then operating inside Somalia. According to insurgents I spoke to this summer in Mogadishu, U.S. intervention alongside Ethiopian forces - U.S. warplanes carried out at least two strikes on suspected Islamists in the south of the country in January, and a warship unleashed an artillery barrage...
...Hundreds of foreign Islamist fighters are heeding calls from Osama bin Laden to go fight in Somalia, according to analysts in the region. And militant leader Aden Hashi Ayro, wounded in the January strikes, has now recovered and is leading a reconstituted and overtly anti-American U.I.C. rebellion in Mogadishu. There is little question that such dire assessments are becoming increasingly accurate...