Word: mogadishu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...earlier incarnation, Aidid was - and some say still is - commander of a clan militia that ruled a district of Mogadishu from the barrel of a gun. A naturalized U.S. citizen who became a U.S. Marine in 1987 and served in Somalia in 1992, Aidid succeeded his father, Mohammed Farrah Aidid, as leader of a Saad clan militia after he was killed in 1996. In 1993, it was the elder Aidid's faction that killed 18 U.S. troops in a bloody Mogadishu street battle made famous by the book and movie Black Hawk Down. Today, by virtue of the clan power...
...void filled by vicious and impressively armed chaos as rival warlords, clans and subclans, and Islamists prosecuted a series of civil wars - over power, over historic animosity and over competing visions of Islam. Last summer, the Islamic Courts Union (i.c.u.) - an alliance of clerics and clan leaders - took Mogadishu and forced the warlords out. In the last two weeks, the T.F.G., backed by thousands of troops from neighboring Ethiopia, several key warlords and, tacitly, the U.S. State Department, has taken most of the country in a lightning advance, cornering the Islamists in a small, deeply forested area in the southeast...
...recognize that they cannot succeed without reaching out to all sectors of the population. "We will reconcile with the Islamists," says Aidid. "All their remnants can join our forces." But given the chaos the warlords wrought over the past 15 years and the fragile order now reigning in Mogadishu, distrust of the T.F.G. on the streets is running high. "For the last six months," says development consultant Muktar Hassan Elmi, "we could say, 'I will live tomorrow and the next day.' Now everything has changed. The warlords are back as part of the government. Now people ask: 'Will I come...
...much of 2006, Administration officials fretted about Somalia, where some of the ruling Islamists had terrorist ties. Next door in Djibouti, America stations around 1,000 troops. But instead of sending them in, we turned to Ethiopia, Somalia's neighbor and longtime rival. When the Ethiopian military rolled into Mogadishu and sent the Islamists fleeing last week, the Bush Administration kept a low profile, applauding the invasion and thanking its lucky stars that it was Ethiopia that launched...
...Mogadishu was once the center of East African trade, an Italianate city of universities and cafes on the Indian Ocean waterways that link Africa with the Arabian peninsula. Since the collapse of the last functioning government here in 1991, it has been better known as a crucible of bloody warlord anarchy, where 18 American soldiers lost their lives in 1993, and where journalists still visit at their peril. You don't move without an escort of gunmen, you don't stop anywhere for more than a few minutes, you keep your tinted windows closed and you drive to the limits...