Word: rebels
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Abile Mosoco likes to drink coffee while he's fighting. Sip, snipe, sip, snipe. Sometimes the rebel commander reaches for the .22 rifle with telescopic sight that lies next to him as he sits behind a low masonry wall. Sometimes he unslings the Steyr assault rifle from his shoulder and just blasts away. His targets -soldiers of the East Timorese Army, the FDTL-scurry about 200 m below. Every so often a bullet whines overhead, but from his hillside position on the edge of a small plateau near the capital Dili's television tower, Mosoco is a difficult target...
...split within the security forces deepened on May 22, when rebel soldiers in the hills above Dili were joined by the head of the military police, Lieutenant Commander Alfredo Reinado, and 28 of his men. Reinado tells Time that the second in command of the nation's armed forces, Colonel Lere Anan Timur, summoned Reinado to his headquarters at Tasi Tolu, on the city's western outskirts. The two men traveled to the airport, where a tense meeting took place with Defense Minister Roques Rodrigues. "I heard the Colonel say: "I can destroy them all and rebuild again tomorrow,'' Reinado...
Strolling the ramparts of the mountaintop pousada (inn) in his Army-issue shorts and thongs, rebel commander Alfredo Reinado is directing an effort to besiege Dili. Mobile phone glued to his ear, he mutters orders to subordinates 45 km away, who are fighting to recover the body of a fallen companion. "I want to see the battle," he says, "but my men will not let me. They are worried for my safety...
...Since that day, Reinado has been the invisible but devastatingly effective director of East Timor's rebel forces. Holed up in his eyrie at Maubisse, he has welded a bunch of former police, disgruntled soldiers and youth into a ragtag militia with one thing in common[EM]their origins in the country's west...
...have taken to looting and pillaging the people they are meant to protect. In early May, Congolese troops in Ituri in the northeast forced at least 4,500 refugees out of a camp because they suspected militia fighters were sheltering there. Some Congolese units have split back into their rebel and ethnic parts and turned on one another. The upsurge in rapes, killings and torture by Congo's security forces has become so serious that the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo is debating whether to end its cooperation with the police and army altogether...