Word: warlords
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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...
Events continued to go well -- too well for Aidid's taste. His supporters had greeted with handshakes the first U.S. Marines to hit the Mogadishu beaches Dec. 9, and the warlord himself had attended two peace conferences arranged by retired Ambassador Robert Oakley. But he evidently concluded that the U.S. and the U.N. were making so much progress putting together the beginnings of a peaceful regime that his chance of eventually taking over the whole country was slipping away; he could retrieve it only by causing enough trouble to disrupt the mission. In early June his forces ambushed Pakistani troops...
...Kismayu last December, the door of his C-141 air transport opened to admit a blast of foul air. "It was the smell of rotting flesh," he recalls. Not far from the airstrip was a pile of partly dismembered bodies in a shallow mass grave, victims of a local warlord. In some places, Somalis who at first welcomed the Americans became resentful when they realized that the U.S. would not simply wipe out the warlords who were terrorizing them. At the same time, soldiers found themselves in mortal danger whenever they seemed to be taking sides in even the pettiest...
...when we began pounding Mogadishu like just one more bloodthirsty warlord--that was immoral...
...initially heroic humanitarian effort in Somalia deteriorated into an inept, farcical manhunt worthy of the Three Stooges and reminiscent of the 1989 Manuel Noriega fiasco. The search for Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed reached a comic low when 50 elite U.S. Army Rangers, acting on special "intelligence," stormed a building rumored to house Aideed's rebels--only to find a bunch of U.S. foreign aid workers, whom they promptly arrested...