Word: somali
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...nettle of disastrous defeat, Somalia's President Mohamed Siad Barre last week sought to pluck a flower: the U.S. military assistance for which he has been campaigning for months. From Mogadishu, Barre ordered home 20,000 Somali troops who have been battling Ethiopians, and recently Cubans and Russians, in the neighboring Ogaden region of Ethiopia in support of ethnic Somalis living there. By playing the peacemaker and withdrawing his invasion forces from territory to which he had no claim anyway, Barre satisfied a Washington condition for receiving defensive weapons to protect himself against the troops now sweeping toward...
...military airfield at Dire Dawa, dozens of green-and-brown-camouflaged MiG-17s and 21s thunder off into the sky each day to strike at Somali forces hundreds of miles away. As they roar down the runway, mules pulling carts plod past the barbed-wire boundaries of the tarmac, carrying jugs of water. The combatants themselves are hardly better off. There are indications on both sides that the greenest troops are pushed into the front lines. One captured Somali who said he was 13 years old was shown off by the Ethiopians in Harar. The youth claimed he had been...
...latest round of heavy fighting, which began during the last week of January around Harar, the Ethiopians say they have lost 500 to 700 dead and 1,500 wounded and have killed some 2,000 Somali army regulars. The actual figures are almost certainly higher, but the Ethiopian claim to have taken only 17 prisoners is probably accurate: both sides expect their soldiers to die fighting, and each side claims the other has special squads to eliminate troops that surrender...
Western diplomats in the area believe that while the Ethiopians have settled in for a long campaign to push the Somalis out of the Ogaden, the war could end fairly quickly if the Somalis decide to pull their army back, intact, behind their border. Indeed there was some indication that they were withdrawing their heavy artillery. But according to Somalian officials, this merely signals a shift back to guerrilla tactics against the Ethiopian forces. If the Somalians do execute a full retreat, there is now no serious concern that the Ethiopians will try to occupy any Somali territory, although...
...week's end relations between the press and the government had deteriorated beyond repair. Several Western reporters were accused of being CIA agents because they tried to take pictures of a burned-out Somali tank near the front, and two photographers were detained for three hours for taking pictures of bodies on the streets. A group of American journalists was even denied permission to attend a U.S. embassy reception, prompting an official American protest to the Ethiopian foreign ministry. The tour ended with a canned press conference at which Mengistu answered questions which had been submitted by the correspondents...