Word: somali
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Mogadishu, the air is filled with the sounds of urban warfare and unresolved political chaos, but in the Nairobi neighborhood of Eastleigh - a.k.a. "Little Mogadishu" - the dominant sound is that of radios tuned to a local station play a strange Somali song: Cudur, meaning "Disease", speaks of the dangers of AIDS, and warns Somalis to think twice about the social stigma that comes along with this sexually transmitted disease. Somalis don't typically discuss such taboo subjects in public, much less sing about them in bands whose makeup, music and lyrics transcend every boundary imaginable in the traditionally conservative Somali...
...tiny room at the back of a Somali restaurant near Port Elizabeth's harbor, Abdi Maolin, 26, has spent 11 months lying on a dirty mattress, eating kitchen leftovers and urinating through a tube attached to his bladder. Propping himself up on his elbows, Abdi digs out a police report that describes how on June 6 last year, six men stormed a Somali grocery store where Abdi and his elder brother Mohammed worked. One shot Mohammed in the forehead, killing him. When Abdi ran, another shot him in the spinal chord, paralyzing him from the chest down. Abdi says...
...Somalis - insular, entrepreneurial and, above all, prosperous - who bear the brunt of South Africa's new prejudice. The Southern African Somali Association says more than 400 Somalis were murdered here in the last decade. In three days over Christmas 2004, seven were killed. Last year, 32 were murdered in and around Cape Town alone. Black South Africans have begun purging their neighborhoods. Last August in Cape Town, a crowd of 200 drove Somalis out of the seaside township of Masiphumele. On February 12, after a Somali shopkeeper fired on a robber and killed a passerby in Port Elizabeth...
...wounds of that pogrom are still fresh. As Abdi talks, a troop of crippled young Somali men arrive. One has a cast on his left forearm, the bone shattered by a bullet; another is on crutches, his right leg amputated after a knee-capping; a third lost his left eye. Abdi's room feels like a field hospital. But it was to escape such horrors - militiamen had killed their mother and another brother on their farm outside Baidoa - that Abdi and his brother left in 2004. "We chose South Africa for a better life," he says. "We came here...
...fighters have been adopting al-Qaeda tactics at times. The Ogaden National Liberation Front, a Somali rebel group, killed nine Chinese oil workers and 65 Ethiopians at a rig in eastern Ethiopia in April. A diplomat in Nairobi warns of a "third front in the war on terror." The parallels to Iraq, which the U.S. alleged had links to al-Qaeda, only to invade and create them by sowing chaos and anti-U.S. sentiment, are plain. "America's aggression helped us a lot," explains jihadi commander Mohammed Mahmood Ali in Mogadishu. "We got a lot of support from that...