Word: mogadishu
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Last Friday marked the tenth anniversary of the Battle of the Black Sea, a day-long episode of urban warfare in Mogadishu, Somalia, that claimed the lives of 18 American troops and more than 500 hundred Somali militiamen. On Oct. 3, 1993, a team of U.S. special operations soldiers—mainly from Delta Force and the Army Rangers—was airdropped into the city’s volatile Bakara Market neighborhood. Their assignment: to capture two prominent lieutenants of Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. What followed was, as Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden notes...
...Egypt and Saudi Arabia (and eventually everywhere from Morocco to Indonesia), and to eliminate the Jewish state in their midst. Al-Qaeda propaganda regularly proclaims that the U.S. will flee from a head-on fight in Muslim lands, citing the examples of the withdrawals from Beirut in 1985 and Mogadishu in '94. Bin Laden is unlikely to have imagined that the 9/11 attacks would force the U.S. to immediately quit Saudi Arabia or to abandon Israel, but the jihadis operate in a time-frame far more long-term than that of their adversaries - the reason, for example, that the region...
...welfare of the world but quite another to interfere in another country's affairs. If Americans must play global watchdog, they might as well let the occupied nation do its own work. The images portrayed in your report were sad reminders of the mission that went bad in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. Haven't Americans seen enough? How long will they allow their countrymen to suffer at the hands of the Iraqis? As long as the U.S. exerts its authority in other countries, it will certainly be unwelcome. It's time to use less force and more diplomacy in achieving...
...rocket launcher has long been a favorite of guerrilla armies everywhere, because it evens up the odds against more heavily armed and armored enemies. The Afghans and Chechens have used them to devastating effect against the Russians, and Somali militiamen used one to down a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter in Mogadishu. And they may be an even more attractive option in Baghdad because of the fact that, as one commentator has noted, "superbly effective and light bullet-proof vests and helmets make the U.S. and British soldier almost as well protected as the medieval knight...
...have been the thousands of chemical-weapons-protection suits coalition forces found in abandoned Iraqi bunkers. Another harrowing scenario is that if an extended siege of Baghdad failed to break Saddam's hold on power, the U.S. would be forced to send its forces downtown to get him. Since Mogadishu, the U.S. has significantly improved its urban-combat readiness, training soldiers how to fight in claustrophobic environments in which 90% of the targets are less than 50 yards away. But nothing can prepare young soldiers for the relentless hell of the real thing. Urban engagements historically result in 30% casualty...