Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 26, 1993 TAG: 9310260038
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHELLE FAUL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: MOGADISHU, SOMALIA LENGTH: Medium
Women shrieked with joy and jigged a victory dance and children clapped in delight as the teen-ager's bullet found its mark Monday. A man fell 100 yards up the road.
"Come here, come here! We want to see you!" one woman taunted, pulling a pink veil from her head and flicking it with a bullfighter's flourish toward incoming gunfire.
Going into battle Somali-style involves the entire family. Monday's fight was between two of the extended "families" in the Hawiye clan: Gen. Mohamed Farrah Aidid's Habre-Gedir and archrival Ali Mahdi Mohamed's Agbal.
Behind Mogadishu's bombed-out library, dozens of veiled girls and women, toothless old women and agile white-haired men followed teen-age fighters toward the dividing Green Line that Ali Mahdi's people were trying to cross into Aidid's territory.
Crackles and booms electrified the air as the two sides exchanged dozens of rounds from Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifles, American M-16s and SAR-80s, and the rocket-propelled grenades that are a favored weapon here.
The group, perhaps 60 members in all, paused for a moment, then continued toward the shooting, a man holding the hand of a boy who looked no older than 3.
"We are not fighting them. We don't want to create trouble. We are only acting in self-defense," said a clan elder, Abdullyadir Sheikh Ali, as he scrambled over the rubble from an earlier battle. The group advanced, clinging to the sides of a wall.
The pink-shrouded woman took cover behind a large tree trunk, peered out to select a target, then yelled directions to the teen-age son crouched at her feet, his eye glued to the sights of an M-16.
Girls moved from tree to tree, offering the gunmen water from plastic jugs.
They urged one young man to fire a rocket-propelled grenade. Self-importantly, he cleared the space behind him, then let fly with a deafening whoosh.
The girls grabbed each other and danced in a circle. Other children clapped.
Kids then started a new game, egging each other on to sprint across the street in defiance of the snipers.
They squealed with laughter while women chattered excitedly and men shouted orders, making almost enough noise to drown out the gunshots.
Two U.S. Army helicopters, a Black Hawk and a Cobra, droned overhead, surveying the fighting but following U.N. orders that forbid them to intervene in clan clashes unless troops are in danger.
The presence of women and children in the raucous street battles presents problems for the U.N. peacekeeping force. Some have been used as shields on the front lines. "Certainly that's a consideration that the . . . troops have been faced with for sometime," said Capt. Tim McDavitt of New Zealand, a U.N. spokesman.
Women have also been used to smuggle arms, which they hide under their voluminous robes. The U.N. force includes thousands of Muslim soldiers, who refuse to search females.
In Monday's fight, six girls sitting under a tree a couple hundred yards from the shooting broke into song: "Aidid don't tire. Your people are behind you. You will be king."
They flirted with 16-year-old Omar Mohamed Jimale as he took a break, his arms drooped casually over the rifle stretched across his shoulders.
"We're going to teach them a real lesson this time," he boasted.
An older man looked at a journalist and shrugged.
"They are not serious. This is just boys playing with their guns," he said, recalling tank battles in the three-year civil war that devastated Mogadishu's center, including the National Theater and, across the way, the National Museum of Somalia with its graceful arches.
At the intersection, a bullet hit a young boy, maybe 9 or 10 years old, in the leg. People stopped only long enough to get the child into a car and off to the hospital.
Then the kids went back to playing their game, and the snipers resumed theirs.
by CNB