Word: mogadishu
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...Horn of Africa. President Clinton's Pentagon was first bloodied there when 18 soldiers died in a 1993 firefight memorialized in Black Hawk Down. As a reminder of the volatile environment, local insurgents on Monday fired mortar rounds at a private plane ferrying U.S. Congressman Donald Payne out of Mogadishu after he had visited with the head of the country's weak new transitional government. (See pictures of the brazen pirates of Somalia...
...question of whether Sharif is a moderate is open to question. He was a founder of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) which took power in Mogadishu for a few months in 2006 after ejecting the city's long-sparring warlords. The ICU imposed strict Shari'a law and, unwisely, declared a jihad on Ethiopia, which subsequently invaded and overthrew it at the end of 2006. In addition, the ICU tolerated the presence of extreme Islamist militants, including the Somali-based al-Qaeda group that blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing more than 200 people...
...Somalia Power Struggle After a failed two-year attempt to help stabilize its neighbor, Ethiopia pulled its troops out of Mogadishu on Jan. 26. Within hours, Islamic militants occupied the capital. The Somali government agreed to give moderate Islamists increased parliamentary representation and is working to elect a new President. But hard-line insurgents declared the changes invalid, took control of the city and have begun pushing into outlying areas...
...they leave behind? In Iraq, the U.S. has taken confidence from the emergence of the Sunni Awakening movement, former insurgents who drove al-Qaeda out of their communities (even if their relations with the Shi'ite-led Iraqi government remain tense). A similar movement has begun to emerge in Mogadishu, reflecting the moderate, tolerant Islam that has traditionally prevailed in Somalia. But Somalia hasn't had a government to speak of for 18 years. There are no institutions that can be revived to institutionalize the new pro-law, anti-extremist movement. And the ICU is remembered, during its brief reign...
...primary effect of Ethiopia's pull-out will simply be to stop Ethiopian troops being killed on the streets of Mogadishu. It will take a lot more than that to fix Somalia. See pictures of piracy in Somalia...