http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1676188/posts?page=2224#2224
===
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1691521/posts
"Somalia: 'Withdraw Or Be Ready for-Full Scale War' - Aweys to Ethiopia"
all africa ^ | August 26, 2006 | Addis Ababa
Posted on 08/28/2006 3:19:54 PM PDT by Flavius
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=hamas
---
NOTE: The following post is quote:
--
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1691526/posts
HAMAS TO LAUNCH SATELLITE TV
ADN Kronos (Italy) ^ | August 28, 2006
Posted on 08/28/2006 3:43:09 PM PDT by HAL9000
Gaza, 28 August (AKI) - Palestinian government party Hamas will launch a satellite television channel in October, the Palestinian news agency Ramattan reported on Monday. Hamas launched an experimental terrestrial channel last year to give its candidates visibility in the electoral campaign leading to general elections in January. Ramattan said it will be the first Palestinian political channel to broadcast via satellite.
http://www.netnomad.com/aydiidyounger.nyt.html
August 12, 1996
How a U.S. Marine Became a Warlord in Somalia
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
OGADISHU, Somalia -- One of the many oddities in this battered capital is that a son of Gen. Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the Somali faction leader who humiliated the United States in 1993, was a naturalized American citizen, not to mention a U.S. Marine.
But that bizarre footnote took on a new dimension last weekend after the general died of gunshot wounds he had received in battle. His clan elders, meeting behind closed doors, selected the same 33-year-old son, Hussein Mohamed Farrah, to become the new president of Aidid's self-proclaimed republic.
It was a strange choice, politicians here say. Until a year ago, Farrah was living an obscure and mundane life in a Los Angeles suburb, going to school part time and working as a clerk in the West Covina engineering department for $9 a hour. The closest he had come to his father's way of life was when he served as a corporal in the Marine reserves.
Now Somalis throughout this war-weary country are waiting uneasily to see how the young warlord with the American accent will change the balance of power among the clan leaders who have carved Somalia up into what amounts to feudal kingdoms.
On the ruined streets of Mogadishu, the same questions were heard on many lips last week: Is the son a copy of his father -- the ambitious and ruthless general who wanted to subdue the entire country by force? Or will he be a peacemaker, a man capable of ending the civil war that has scourged this harsh desert land since 1990?
Any hope that Farrah's appointment would soon lead to a cease-fire here evaporated this weekend as his forces clashed outside the city in heavy fighting with militia members loyal to Mohamed Ali Mahdi, whose Abgal clan controls the north end of the capital. A counteroffensive by Farrah's followers was meant to push back Ali Mahdi's troops, who had cut off Farrah's section of town from a major airport.
With his white shirt and tie and his clean-cut hair style, Farrah certainly looks and sounds more like an American college student than a hardened Somali faction leader. Speaking at a memorial service in Mogadishu stadium for his father on Friday, he seemed wooden and ill at ease in front of the microphones, like a man caught unwillingly in the spotlight. He spoke only five minutes, avoiding politics.
"I did not come here to address you or give a political speech," he told more than 20,000 people crammed into the stadium. "I just came here, as we all did, to bless my father."
Most Somali leaders said they were stunned when Farrah was named to lead the powerful Habr Gedir clan, which dominates a political faction that controls much of the capital and the south-central part of the country.
"It surprised even us," said Ali Mahdi, who controls north Mogadishu and who was Aidid's major rival for the Somali presidency. "It's impossible -- 34 or 33 years old and inexperienced. We don't know how he can lead the country."
Having spent most of his adult life in the United States, Farrah is a newcomer to Somalia's tortured political stage, political analysts here say. He is also young and politically inexperienced, in a culture that reveres its elders and takes pride in the cleverness of its politicians.
His naivete was evident last week. In his first speech, he promised to crush his enemies at home and abroad. In another speech the next day, he professed to want peace.
He also embarrassed some of his father's closest political allies when he told reporters that he would personally intervene in the case of an Australian pilot who has been jailed since June for landing illegally in Somalia. In recent days, his advisers have kept him away from journalists. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
-snip-