Word: qaeda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that it's unreasonable to expect a brand-new army and police force to stand up in such a short time. Iraqi soldiers get just six weeks' basic training, cops only eight--hardly the best preparation to do battle with a bewildering array of enemies, ranging from al-Qaeda terrorists and Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias to well-armed criminal gangs. Motivation is another problem: soldiers get starting salaries of $375 a month, policemen $95 a month. Iraqi commanders also complain that they are poorly equipped: they lack airpower and heavy weapons...
...missile strike that killed Somalia's most notorious Islamist insurgent, Aden Hashi Ayro, has dealt a major blow to al-Qaeda's allies operating in East Africa. The deaths of Ayro and up to 10 others were announced early Thursday by spokesman for his al-Shabab militia, while the U.S. military confirmed it had struck what it called an al-Qaeda target in Somalia, but offered no details. Al-Shabab spokesmen said the men were killed early Thursday by a U.S. air strike on a house in Dusamareeb, a few hundred miles north of Mogadishu. "Infidel planes bombed Dhusamareb," Shabab...
...Ayro had been trained by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, where he later fought alongside the Taliban against the Northern Alliance and the U.S. before returning to Somalia in 2003 to join - and quickly come to lead - a group of Somali and foreign radical militants that had been established by Osama bin Laden in remote swamps in the southeast of the country. It was this group that Washington blames for the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and for the 2002 attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya, as well as several other...
...were killed in the "Blackhawk Down" fiasco that befell an operation aimed at capturing a key Mogadishu warlord whose forces had imperiled a U.N. humanitarian mission. More recently, however, the focus has been on terrorism, and particularly on Ayro as he rose up the chain of command in al-Qaeda's East African operations. Although reports were sketchy, security sources suspected his involvement in a number of assassinations, including the death of four foreign aid workers in the semi-autonomous Somaliland region in 2003 and 2004, as well as the killing of BBC journalist Kate Peyton in Mogadishu...
...Police and army officers had been clustered there near chunks of concrete and walls of sand bags in an effort to heighten security. In the eastern neighborhood of Zayouna, another car bomb exploded at a police checkpoint, killing three people, wire services reported. "These attacks are evidence that al-Qaeda is still a very large threat," Rear Admiral Patrick Driscoll, a spokesman for the multi-national forces in Iraq, said Sunday, "We are continuously very closely focused on al-Qaeda...