Wanted: Warlord No. 1

By Andrew Purvis/Mogadishu

MOHAMMED FARRAH AIDID can work the crowd as well as any politician. At a demonstration last week in Mogadishu against the U.S.-led air strikes, the United Nations' most-wanted man switched nimbly between martyrdom and angry defiance. Stretching his hands skyward, he led 1,000 clansmen in prayer, urging them to take comfort in Islam. "The U.N. and the U.S. are trying to impose colonial rule on us," he said. "God will destroy Washington as surely as they have destroyed Mogadishu."

The man accused of ordering the ambushes in which 23 Pakistani peacekeepers died may not be "the Eisenhower of Somalia," as he has described himself. But he is also not the simple thug that the U.S. has made him out to be. The sixtyish former ambassador to India remains the most prominent figure in the powerful Habr Gadir clan and a heavyweight in the country's precarious power balance. He is widely respected by Somalis for his leadership in ousting former dictator Mohammed Siad Barre and for his military successes on behalf of his clan. His anti-U.N. and -U.S. radio addresses sparked a vigorous response: riots convulsed Mogadishu twice in the past five months. "He is a war criminal whose indiscriminate shelling of civilians contributed to many deaths," said a Somali journalist. "But he is a very strong clan leader, and the U.N. attacks have made him even more important as a spokesman for the Somalis against foreign aggression."

Less than a year ago, Aidid's talent for milking the countryside and extorting money from foreign relief groups had earned him control of almost half the country. A defeat at the hands of another warlord in October and the subsequent occupation of his territory by U.S. troops diminished his influence, making him wary, then openly hostile. As his dreams of a presidency faded, said a relief worker, "Aidid was just itching to push the U.N. to the limit." While he never expected his belligerence to culminate in an international warrant for his arrest, he preferred to fight rather than slip into anonymity.

Aidid's real name is Hassan. Following a common custom, his mother chose a nickname for him that she thought expressed his uncommon determination: Aidid means "one with no weaknesses." He fancies himself a poet in a country nourished on oral tradition and lives the spartan life of a nomad. In the 1950s he served in the Italian colonial police force and as a general in Siad Barre's army in the war with Ethiopia. But as a tribal rival of Siad Barre's Darod clan family, he was never fully trusted and was imprisoned without trial for six years in the early 1970s. Later, Siad Barre appointed him envoy to New Delhi to get him out of the country. In 1991 he finally joined in the overthrow of Siad Barre. Soon, though, he fell out with another leader of the congress, Ali Mahdi Mohammed: in a three-month period the two men shelled the once beautiful port city of Mogadishu into a crumbling ruin. His estranged wife and children left the country years ago. But one son returned -- as a U.S. Marine, wading ashore last December to liberate Somalia from the likes of his father.