Somalis who kicked Americans out now wish they would come back

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- Ten years ago, Somalis welcomed American troops as saviors in their starved and battered land. Then they drove them out. Now many wish the Americans would come back.

Instead, they find themselves on President Bush's terrorism blacklist.

"We need them desperately. We need a rescue mission from the Americans," said Mohamed Jama Furuh, manager of the empty port where containers and cranes sit rusting in the sun. If they hadn't left, he said, "Somalia would have been one of the developing countries. It would not be the graveyard it is now."

Since 1991 there has been no government to speak of in this Texas-sized country of 7 million on the Horn of Africa. These days a two-year-old transitional regime runs barely half of Mogadishu, the capital. Warlords control the rest. About half a million Somalis are refugees in neighboring Kenya. Hundreds of thousands more are homeless in Somalia itself.

In October, at peace talks in Kenya, 20 factions and the transitional government endorsed a peace agreement calling for a cease-fire and a new system of government. But negotiations are months away from completion, and no one wants to disarm first, so clan-based clashes continue.

Weapons sold openly

Gunfire is so common in Mogadishu that kids playing by a camp for homeless people in Mogadishu don't even look up when rounds from an AK-47 crackle in the air as a battered pickup speeds by loaded with gun-toting teenagers.

Crumbling government buildings and bullet-riddled villas from Italian colonial times line potholed, garbage-strewn streets. Assault rifles, heavy machine guns and grenade launchers are sold openly in markets.

On Dec. 9, 1992, U.S. troops waded ashore in Mogadishu in the glare of TV lights, the vanguard of a a 21-nation mission to feed hundreds of thousands of people during a war-induced famine.

The U.S.-led mission then turned its efforts to restoring order in Somalia, but dozens of U.N. peacekeepers and at least 25 U.S. troops were killed, along with hundreds, possibly thousands, of Somalis.

Now, even Somalis who fought the foreigners 10 years ago want America's help to end their nightmare.

"I believe they are the sole power who can do something for our country. We would like America to use its political influence, not through fighting, to bring peace to our country," said Dahir Mohamed Hassan.

Now in his 40s and a guard at a hotel, Hassan said he fought U.S. forces in the Oct. 3, 1993, battle of Mogadishu in which 18 Americans died trying to capture aides of faction leader Mohamed Farah Aidid.

"People lost confidence in the Americans when they started hunting Aidid, our comrade, our leader," said Hassan, who said he grabbed his AK-47 rifle in anger after a rocket fired by a U.S. helicopter destroyed his house.

Protesting the Americans

Images of angry mobs dragging the bodies of dead U.S. soldiers through the streets were broadcast worldwide, and became the subject of the book and movie "Black Hawk Down." The Americans left in 1993.

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has been quoted as saying it was the battle of Mogadishu that led him to believe the Americans lacked the stomach for war.

Western countries then more or less ignored the largely Muslim nation -- until the Sept. 11 attacks.

President Bush put the country's largest company, Al-Barakat, and a Somali Islamic group, al-Ittihad al-Islami, on a list of groups believed to have links to al-Qaida. Israeli and U.S. officials suspect al-Ittihad was involved in last month's attack in Mombasa that killed 10 Kenyans and three Israelis.

Some 800 U.S. troops have set up base in neighboring Djibouti as part of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, and U.S. Navy and allied vessels patrol off Somalia's 2,000-mile coastline -- the longest in Africa.

"American forces will pursue the terrorists wherever they go, but that pursuit has to be carefully couched; hopefully it will be with a coalition ... with strict rules of engagement," said Col. Richard Mills, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit and a Mogadishu veteran. The unit recently held exercises in Djibouti and Kenya.

Somalis insist the link to terrorism is untrue. But Furuh, the port manager, acknowledges that Somalia is lawless and unable to police its borders.

"When the door is open, anybody can go through," he said.

Businessmen in Somalia have managed to set up TV and radio stations and one of the cheapest telephone networks in Africa. But the main port and airport have been closed since the peacekeepers departed, and gun battles can erupt anytime, anywhere.