One of them, a farmer named Yusuf Sheikh Husein, lay prostrate, his muscles wasted to nothingness from months of starvation. It came away like a thin leaf of paper. Mohamed Farah Aidid, fingering a silver-tipped walking stick. The money the U. Although he contends that, given the chance, his own forces can guarantee the security of relief supplies, the latest transgression against the international relief effort has been laid at his door: the looting last Friday of tons of relief food and barrels of fuel for food convoys from the port of Mogadishu.
The costly free-for-all was overseen by three tanks of a sort that only Aidid commands in Mogadishu. The stolen food had been destined for distribution in north Mogadishu, which is controlled not by Aidid but by a powerful rival.
Incidents like that make the obstreperous and dangerous Aidid one of the most dubious characters with whom international relief officials in Somalia must deal.
A former military officer, Cabinet minister and ambassador in the government of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, Aidid was jailed by Siad Barre from to for suspected complicity in a coup attempt.
Released and rehabilitated, he left government service in to join the anti-Siad Barre campaign of the rebel United Somali Congress. After Siad Barre tried a military comeback following his ouster in January, , Aidid pursued him to the Kenyan border, driving him from Somalia apparently for good. He said he can muster about 30, men under the banner of the Somali Liberation Alliance, a loose confederation of four clan-based armies.
