Word: mogadishu
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...world's most failed state, shattered by war and serving as a safe haven for both al-Qaeda and pirates. Sharif, a strict Islamist who nevertheless believes in dialogue with the West and who came to power in January, rules little more than a few blocks in Mogadishu, and recently even that has been threatened by a ferocious attack by his former allies in Somalia's Islamist movement. He spoke to TIME about his government, life in Somalia and the issue of piracy. (See pictures of Somali pirates...
...much needed reminder of the scale of the catastrophe. One million Somalis are refugees. Two million need food. For most of these, malnutrition rates are beyond the U.N. threshold definition of an emergency. Around 400,000 refugees are in a single sprawling camp at Afgooye outside Mogadishu; 70,000 have arrived in the last month after fleeing the latest round of fighting in the capital. A further 275,000 have fled south to Kenya and live in three camps at Dadaab in the north of the country originally meant for 90,000; the U.N. High Commission for Refugees says...
...warlords and Islamists, the latest round in this Byzantine bloodbath pitches the Islamist government against marginally more extreme Islamist rebels to whom it was allied until last year. Not that the terms government and rebel really apply to Somalia. Both groups control little more than a few blocks of Mogadishu and a handful of small towns, and neither has much function - or often, it seems, ambition - aside from fighting the other. (Read: "In Somalia, Another Government Teetering...
...agreement is severely threatened, just as events in Somalia have brought the Administration's foreign-policy competence under new questioning. And the timing is no coincidence. Clinton may have thought that by ruling out an immediate U.S. pullout from Somalia after the Oct. 3 fire fight in Mogadishu, which claimed 18 American lives, he was demonstrating that the U.S. would not cut and run if some of its soldiers were killed. But by setting a March 31 deadline for withdrawal, no matter what, he seems to have initially sent the opposite message to the Haitian military leaders...
Monitoring and combating any of these misdeeds is next to impossible - Somalia's current government can barely find its feet in the wake of the 2006 U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion. And many Somalis, along with outside observers, suspect local officials in Mogadishu and in ports in semi-autonomous Puntland further north of accepting bribes from foreign fishermen as well as from pirate elders. U.N. monitors in 2005 and 2006 suggested an embargo on fish taken from Somali waters, but their proposals were shot down by members of the Security Council. (See photos of dramatic pirate rescues...