Quotes & Sayings About Mogadishu

Surrounded by enemies, there were officially no enemies for them. With civilization at large trickling down shitholes like Mogadishu and Kigali and Port-au-Prince, the "new" Army was under strict orders: Thou shalt have no enemy. No casualties. No turf. You occupied high ground only long enough to let the politicos rattle sabers and get reelected, and then you moved on to the next bad place. The landscape changed; the hatreds did not. — Jeff Long

Garrison wrote in his memo to Hoar. "There is no place in Mogadishu we cannot go and be successful in a fight. There are plenty of places we can go and be stupid. — Mark Bowden

I think the Mogadishu effect, if I had to define it, is we need to be more careful where we decide to commit US forces, and for what reason, and to make a clear judgment as to what we can and can't do and whether it's in our interests, or we could afford the resources that it would take to make the situation right. — Anthony Zinni

Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say. — Nadifa Mohamed

I'm an Englishman who did a film on Mogadishu, 'Black Hawk Down.' — Ridley Scott

This is a big deal. My wife and I sat in our home and we watched those young men get slaughtered on the streets of Mogadishu in the absence of a plan. It broke our heart. — Dick Armey

Outside events can change a presidential campaign, a president, and the history of the nation: the Iranian hostage crisis, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the downing of the helicopter in Mogadishu, Somalia, the suicide attack on the USS Cole, and, of course, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. — Mark McKinnon

In those sticky summer nights in South London our windows stay open and our tiny apartment becomes our secret garden. The magic of the secret garden is that it exists in our imagination. There are no limits, no borderlines. The secret garden leads to the marigolds of Mogadishu and the magnolias of Kingston and when the heat turns us sticky and sweet and unwilling to be claimed by defeat we own the night. We own our bodies. We own our lives. — Diriye Osman

Mogadishu was like the postapocalyptic world of Mel Gibson's Mad Max movies, a world ruled by roving gangs of armed thugs. They were here to rout the worst of the warlords and restore sanity and civilization. — Mark Bowden

When I came to Mogadishu ... here was one road built by the Italians. If you try to force me to stand down, I will leave the city as I found it. I came to power with a gun; only the gun can make me go. — Siad Barre

Whatever happens in Mogadishu, in Somalia, will happen in Great Britain. We have interlocking interests. — William Hague

Most unmarried Somali girls who got pregnant committed suicide. I knew of one girl in Mogadishu who poured a can of gasoline over herself in the living room, with everyone there, and burned herself alive. Of course, if she hadn't done this, her father and brothers would probably have killed her anyway. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Deploying LOGCAP or other contractors instead of military personnel can alleviate the political and social pressures that have come to be a fact of life in the U.S. whenever military forces are deployed," wrote Lt. Col. Steven Woods in his Army War College study about the effects of LOGCAP. "While there has been little to no public reaction to the deaths of five DynCorp employees killed in Latin America or the two American support contractors from Tapestry Solutions attacked (and one killed) in Kuwait ... U.S. forces had to be withdrawn from Somalia after public outcry following the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu. ... "Additionally, military force structure often has a force cap, usually for political reasons. Force caps impose a ceiling on the number of soldiers that can be deployed into a defined area. Contractors expand this limit. — Rachel Maddow