Word: somalia
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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...
...many Africans old enough to remember the Cold War, the bloody conflict currently unfolding in Somalia will be awfully familiar. Back before the Berlin Wall fell, localized power struggles all over the continent often turned into full-scale regional wars when the protagonists cast themselves, or were cast - however improbably - as torch-bearers for Washington or Moscow. Such association would bring boundless diplomatic and financial support, not to mention boatloads of weapons and other military assistance, enabling local strongmen to wage self-serving wars for years on end. There's no Cold War any longer, of course...
...much of the time since the overthrow of President Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, Mogadishu and much of Somalia has been ruled by clan-based warlords who laid waste the country and turned Mogadishu into an anarchic, continuous battlefield. More than 100,000 people died in the fighting in 1991-92, and 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...
...With that background, the world - and the U.S. in particular - was never going to forget Somalia easily. As the only officially Christian country in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia has long been wary of Somalia's Islamic militias, which it describes as a "regional menace." (While it is officially Christian, Ethiopia has a population that is about half Muslim.) It shares that anti-Islamist position with the U.S., particularly since August 1998 when simultaneous suicide bombings destroyed the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing more than 200 people. The ringleaders were tracked to Somalia, and an Islamist...
...support for the corrupt, violent and self-serving warlords alienated many Somalis - and some analysts argue actually strengthened the popularity of the Islamists, enabling Somalia's top Islamic body, the Council of Islamic Courts, to take over Mogadishu and expel the warlords in June. The arrival of Islamist rule in Mogadishu, and the initial imposition of law and order that accompanied it, was widely welcomed on the war-torn streets of the capital. As Ethiopian troops advanced toward them, thousands of supporters of the Courts were reported to have staged rallies in Mogadishu. The Islamists are are also backed...