Word: somalia
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...Somalia's 2,000-mile coastline, inhospitable, warlord-dominated terrain and the near total absence of government authority make it perfect bin Laden country. And the U.S. believes there's already an association: "Somalia has been a place that has harbored al Qaeda and, to my knowledge, still is," Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said Tuesday. And in this era of zero-tolerance, that's fighting talk...
...Last month, the U.S. put the financial squeeze on the desperately poor country by freezing the assets of Al Barakaat, a Western Union-style money wiring service, and closing down the Internet connection of the Somalia Internet Company (and with it the whole country's Internet access), accusing both of having links with Al Qaeda. The move choked the largest revenue source of Somalia's near-stagnant economy - remittances sent home via Al Barakaat by thousands of Somalis living abroad. Somali authorities strenuously deny any Al Qaeda presence in their country, and President Abdiqasim Salad Hassan has pledged full cooperation...
...Washington believes, however, that the bin Laden link to Somalia sidesteps the government, instead running through a local Islamist group called Al Itihad al Islamiya that may have established links with Al Qaeda in the early 1990s. U.S. officials also cite allegations that some of the Somali fighters that killed 18 U.S. Army Rangers in Mogadishu in 1993 may have been trained by bin Laden lieutenant Mohammed Atef. Atef had been an Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader before becoming Al Qaeda's operational chief and allegedly helping mastermind the September 11 attacks. He was reportedly killed two weeks ago during...
...destroyed as a military force in a cross-border showdown with the Ethiopian military in 1996. They claim its fighters have dispersed and the movement exists today primarily as a politically-motivated welfare group. "They were an armed force but now we don't know of any camps in Somalia," says President Hassan. "We invite the Americans to come here and investigate...
...military certainly has ugly memories of Somalia. But if it did choose to strike at targets there, the Pentagon would be unlikely to repeat the mistakes of the 1993 Mogadishu fiasco. A more likely scenario would be the Afghanistan model of air power used in combination with local proxy forces - the Ethiopians come to mind, although there would be plenty of local warlords open to turning against any Al Qaeda elements for a small...