Jeffrey Bartholet

When allied troops arrived at Baidoa's airport last week, they found the Somali gunmen who usually "guard" it drawn up in a ragged but recognizably military formation.

In a foxhole outside Mogadishu's old air base, Lance Cpl. Marcus Washington waits and worries. The rains drench him, but he keeps his head down: he's been warned about snipers.

The most unsettling feature of Mogadishu is not the eerie silence of the "green line," where bits of litter taken by the breeze scrape past shattered buildings and blasted trees.

Habiba Muallem Abdulle, 70-year-old mother of 12, presides over a Red Cross feeding kitchen behind Mogadishu's old parade grounds' The site was used by former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre to celebrate the coup that brought him to power 23 years ago.

Mohamed Ali Kaariye sits bare-chested on the floor, a sheet wrapped around his waist in the fashion of a Greek philosopher. In front of him is a tape recorder hooked up to a car battery.

The letter was smuggled out of Juba in southern Sudan last summer. "Lucky are the people in Yugoslavia and Somalia, for the world is with them," it said plaintively. "It may be a blessing to die or get killed in front of a camera, because the world will know." The world is well informed, and properly appalled, about "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and the mass starvation caused by civil strife in Somalia.

"I can't standup," mutters Yussef Sheik Hussein, ignoring the swirl of flies attracted to a half-dozen dying Somalis nearby. "Do you have some medicine?" Hussein's emaciated body seems disconnected from his chiseled, intelligent face.

The port in Mogadishu swarms with a thousand gunmen. The metallic sound of AK-47s being cocked is a familiar background noise, and shots frequently echo across the pavement, mixing with peals of laughter.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini could hardly have wished for more: Saddam Hussein's Army crushed and Shiite rebels fighting his loyalist forces for control of the country.

Liberia's deadly guerrilla war is a battle of simple revenge and tribal bragging rights, not politics Hundreds of miles of dirt road wind through rebel-held Liberian territory.

The rebels of Liberia's National Patriotic Front were determined to capture or kill President Samuel K. Doe last week, even if they had to put a city of 500,000 people under siege.

On the outskirts of Monrovia, four bullet-riddled bodies were strewn in the grass on the side of the road. At the other side of the Liberian capital, two large pools of blood and three severed fingers lay on the sidewalk of the St.