Word: mogadishu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Downtown Mogadishu is a tropical Stalingrad, a bullet-raked, mortar-pounded, artillery-shelled canvas of Roman arches and Italian colonnades that that testifies to man's capacity for creation and also for destruction. Not the sort of place, in other words, that you'd expect to find a $30 million telecommunications concern doing a roaring trade in an ultra-competitive market. Yet, as Mustafa Sheikh, deputy managing director of Telcom Somalia says, the absence of a functioning government for 16 years has been a boon for private enterprise. His firm is one of three in Somalia that provides fixed-line...
...fighting would be bloody. Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution, estimates that the battle for Sadr City would be "Mogadishu times 10"--referring to the failed U.S. effort in the early 1990s to rescue Somalia from anarchy and famine that saw 43 Americans killed. But Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer and military scholar, says taking back Sadr City, while producing potentially substantial losses in the short run, is crucial if the U.S. hopes to curb al-Sadr's strength. "The best way to deal with Sadr City is to just do it--take everything...
...nailing terrorists is one thing; building a nation where none exists is another. "We are starting from scratch," the head of Somalia's new government, Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi, told me in an interview in Mogadishu. Given Somalia's penchant for clan warfare and inhospitableness toward foreign armies--just go out and rent a copy of Black Hawk Down--it's tempting for Western policymakers to wash their hands and wish Gedi luck. But Somalia's strife has repercussions beyond its borders. The country is victim to the worst ravages of man and nature. Instability there has the potential...
...government is to succeed, it's going to need help. During my seven-day stay in Mogadishu this month, I caught a glimpse of the country's dysfunction. Somalia has atomized into its ancient form--a collection of hundreds of clans. Taxation has been replaced by protection rackets ranging from clan gangsters who collect weekly "rent" to garbage collectors who dump rubbish in a street and demand money to remove...
Many Somalis fear that when the Ethiopians kicked out the Islamic Courts, they threw out any hope of security too. The new government counts several warlords in its ranks, and their rivals are rearming. I visited one, Mohamed Qanyere, at a villa on the southern outskirts of Mogadishu. In the forecourt were parked a collection of artillery and pickups mounted with heavy-caliber machine guns. Qanyere claimed to have 1,500 men. Asked about a government decree ordering national disarmament, he scoffed, "If you have two people and you take a weapon from one and I keep mine, what will...