Word: somali
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...Somalia's fate is attracting international attention because of its link to the war against terror. After dismissing comparisons to the Taliban when they took over the Somali capital this summer, the Islamic Courts promptly set about emulating them. Clerics threatened death to those who did not pray five times a day and enforced strict dress codes while Courts leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys declared holy war on Ethiopia, whose eastern parts he claimed belonged to a greater Somalia, along with northeastern Kenya and Djibouti, home to a U.S. base. As TIME reported earlier this year As TIME reported earlier...
...when the U.N. launched a massive relief operation in April 1992, the U.S. was drawn into the conflict - at first guarding the relief, then delivering it, then attacking the warlords that were stealing it. In October 1993, in events depicted in the film Black Hawk Down, Somali militiamen shot down a Blackhawk helicopter over Mogadishu and 18 U.S. servicemen were killed in the crash and subsequent rescue attempt. After gruesome scenes of the bodies of some American servicemen being stripped and paraded through the streets of the city were flashed around the world, the U.S. withdrew from Somalia by March...
...Ethiopia and the U.S. - whose close relationship has long included U.S. training for Ethiopian troops inside Ethiopia - back a transitional Somali government formed in October 2004 after talks between warlords and civilian leaders. Until now, that government has won international recognition, but never exercised real power and has been confined to the small southern Somali town of Baidoa. Both the U.S. and Ethiopia have backed the warlords as well. The exact nature of those relations have never been made public, but an indication of their value to the U.S. came in March 2003, when warlord Mohammed Dhere captured...
...backed Ethiopia's military intervention on behalf of the beleaguered and unpopular - but internationally recognized - Somali government, in what looks set to be a protracted war that could draw in most of Somalia's neighbors. Washington's reason for supporting the offensive, rather than calling for an end to hostilities, is that the enemies of the Ethiopians and the Somali government are an Islamist movement viewed by the U.S. as in cahoots with al-Qaeda...
...While the U.S. and Ethiopia have backed the Somali government and the warlords that operate under its umbrella on the banner of fighting al-Qaeda, the Islamists have allegedly rallied financial and military support from such quarters as Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria and Iran by painting themselves as victims of an Islamophobic Western conspiracy. And Osama bin Laden certainly helped Ethiopia and the Somali government make their case for U.S. support when, in October, he warned Western governments to stay out of Somalia...