Free Republic

Air Force Col. Dan Shoor listens to a young Somali refugee’s cough at a Djiboutian clinic, stretched to its limits because of an influx of 5,000 refugees. Malnutrition is a widespread problem, as are sanitation woes and influenza. About five children in the community of 12,000 die each day, one Army sergeant estimates. CHRIS TYREE PHOTOS / THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT PART 1 OF 2 In faraway desert villages and city slums, U.S. military men and women stationed in the Horn of Africa are healing children, digging water wells and building schools. It's part of a unique approach by a Navy-led...

As fighting began to flare Sunday around Kismayo, in southern Somalia, the final redoubt for the country’s diminished Islamic movement, elders within the city demanded that the Islamists go. Muhammad Arab, a leader of the Ogaden subclan, said 36 elders of various clans and subclans met over the weekend with Islamist leaders and tried to persuade them that resistance against the huge Ethiopian-backed force heading toward them was futile. "We told them that they were going to lose," Mr. Arab said, "and that our city would get destroyed." Kismayo, a scenic harbor town along the Indian Ocean that was once...