Word: somali
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...Carlos Rodriguez the battle was a few seconds of terror, hours of agonized waiting. While his comrades stormed the building near the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu to try to snatch Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid, Rodriguez and the rest of his squad swarmed down ropes from a helicopter and began a security patrol through a nearby street. "It was bright daylight; there were windows and doors all around us, and you can't watch all of them all the time," said Rodriguez. "All of a sudden the Somalis just opened up on us, small arms and grenades. There was shooting...
...hotel. Aidid was not there, though senior U.S. officials insist the Rangers missed him by only two minutes.) Helicopter troops nonetheless captured the hotel and environs and bagged more than 19 Aidid supporters. But as they tried to lead the prisoners away, the streets erupted with gunfire. Somali fighters from all over Mogadishu ran to join the action; in the Bakhara market near the hotel, they set up barricades of burning tires and anything else flammable to block the Rangers' retreat. Rescue helicopters could not land in the narrow streets; the only way out was by ground. From that point...
Americans did not see pictures of the Somali casualties, though. What they did see were ghastly photos of a white body, naked except for green underwear -- apparently the corpse of a downed helicopter crewman -- being dragged through the street while Somalis kicked and stamped at him, plus TV footage of a terrified helicopter pilot, Michael Durant, being questioned by Somali captors. Late in the week the Somalis allowed a Red Cross worker and two journalists to visit Durant as he lay, naked except for a piece of cloth stretched across his hips, on a wooden bed in a darkened room...
...exact mix of motives that prompted George Bush to launch the Somali intervention is still not altogether clear. The immediate causes were, of course, ghastly TV pictures of famine in that country and U.N. Secretary- General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's pleas for help to get food past the guns of armed gangs into the hands of the starving in a country that had no real government and practically no order of any sort. In addition, Bush no doubt wanted to go out in a blaze of glory as a world statesman, and subordinates were glad that the move served...
...that Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger told Boutros-Ghali "that we were going to do something very precise and limited and then get out," in the words of a senior aide to Eagleburger. Boutros- Ghali accepted but then "moved the goalposts," says the official, demanding that the Americans disarm Somali gangs, venture into the countryside and the north of the country, away from the Mogadishu area, and stay for an unlimited period. The tale heard in U.N. corridors is very different: it is of the Americans waffling over whether to disarm the Somalis and whether to move into the north...