Word: somali
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mongrel dogs, Whiskey and Pee Wee, along with his old job, has been in Mogadishu long enough to watch the city go from outright anarchy to "a place that almost feels safe." Bringing peace to Somalia's interior, however, may take some doing. In Baidoa, Purvis saw a young Somali no more than eight years old waltz up to a relief worker who was carrying a bag of cheese-flavored chips. "The kid had an AK-47 draped over his shoulder, its muzzle almost dragging in the dust," says Purvis. While Purvis watched, the pint-size gunman reached...
...under way, the 3,000 U.S. troops found themselves spread thin, trying to answer a host of competing demands. Most of the capital's armed thugs crept away, but soldiers had yet to impose more than a veneer of security. On Saturday, U.S. combat helicopters destroyed three armed Somali vehicles that had opened fire on the American gunship. Relief workers groused about poor communications and stalled food shipments; more urgent were the calls for help from Good Samaritans trapped in their compounds in outlying towns where marauding gunmen were still stealing, fighting and killing. Somali clan leaders pitched hard...
...Mahdi made their tentative peace, neither called on his followers to surrender their weapons. A U.S. senior official said that "Aidid has parked his heavy weapons in Ethiopia." Meanwhile, the gung-ho attempt of some of the vanguard troops to seize weapons slowed perceptibly. French troops initially searched Somali cars for weapons; by week's end they were searching only for the heavy guns that used to be carried on technicals. "It would be inconceivable to disarm Mogadishu," said a senior French army officer...
...seize any weapons in their zone of security. Four soldiers, drawn by gunfire to a gutted six-story building down the block from the U.S. embassy, discovered a large arms cache that included boxes of ammunition, heavy machine guns and a howitzer. They prepared to confiscate it when a Somali man stepped forward to argue that the building belonged to an Aidid ally. He demanded to speak to someone higher up. When Corporal Robert Parrish reached his platoon commander by radio, he was instructed, "Get in your vehicles, and leave the area." The astonished Marines left; the weapons stayed...
From the start, the relationship between the foreign troops and Somalis has been ill defined, leaving ample room for misunderstanding. When a group of heavily armed Marines disgorged from an amphibious assault vehicle stenciled with the name BRAT PACK and tried to secure an airfield hangar, they baffled non-English-speaking Somalis with orders to "Get down on your knees!" and "Spread your arms!" At least one Somali found the treatment inexplicably rude, given that the men were unarmed. "If you are a human being, it's not good for you to be lying on the ground," he said...