Word: qaeda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Nobody wants a death threat from Osama bin Laden. Still, Thursday's release of an audio message from the al-Qaeda supremo calling for Somalis to overthrow their new President, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, may be taken as a compliment in the world's most failed state. In an 11-minute message focused entirely on Somalia and entitled "Fight on, champions of Somalia," bin Laden claimed Sheik Sharif's appointment, which came after he was elected by Somali lawmakers on Jan. 31, was "induced by the American envoy in Kenya," a reference to the U.S. ambassador in Nairobi, Michael Ranneberger...
...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. (See pictures of al-Qaeda...
...TIME that bin Laden's message would only bolster Sharif's standing in his own country. "There's nothing that plays as poorly in Somalia as foreigners trying to advance their own agenda in Somalia - telling them who they may or may not have as a leader - and al-Qaeda is falling into that category. In some ways, you could not script this any better for the new government. On paper, it all looks excellent...
...late. "We have arrested a lot, but there's a lot of corruption here in Iraq," says Colonel Moslet Ahmad Attiyeh, commander of the national police's Salah battalion. "The terrorists pay their way out and are released," he says, whereupon they join other insurgents displaced from al-Qaeda's former stronghold of Anbar and the still volatile Diyala who have found refuge in Mosul...
...destroy it, the population must actively turn against subversive elements within it, and either fight or flush them out in the same way that Sunni tribal sheiks in Anbar switched sides and allied with the Americans against al-Qaeda in their province, a movement known as the Sahwa. That hasn't happened yet, General Brown says, because Mosul's diverse makeup has proved difficult to foster such a movement. The Anbar Sahwa fell into line behind tribal sheiks, whose word is law, but Nineveh is not exclusively a tribal society...