Huh? MRAP’s In Mogadishu For 30 Years Already?
MOGADISHU, Somalia - Super-tough, nearly bomb-proof trucks are all the rage in Iraq these days. But in Africa, these “Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected” vehicles, or MRAPs, have been standard for thirty years. The armored rides with the v-shaped hulls first hit the road in the 1970s during a brutal war in what is now Zimbabwe. Today, they’re the truck of choice for another bloody conflict: the 17-year-old series of civil wars and invasions and insurgencies in Somalia.
I went riding with the Ugandans today. Fifteen hundred of them deployed to Mogadishu eight months ago under an African Union banner, and with U.S. funding, in a bid to seize and hold the key infrastructure that some future international force would need to begin stabilizing the embattled city – a “bridgehead,” according to Captain Paddy Ankunda.
This ain’t your typical peacekeeping mission: within moments of stepping foot on Somali soil at the seaport, the Ugandans got mortared – and the attacks have continued. Roadside bombs, suicide bombers, mortars, rockets, snipers and insurgent infantry assaults – the range and intensity of threats makes Mogadishu “like Baghdad,” Paddy says. So when the Ugandans roll out, they roll out under armor, in RG-31 Nyala minesweepers and what appears to be an open-top, single-crew variant of the Casspir — the smaller predecessor of the American 25-ton Buffalo monster truck.
U.S. MRAPs are fairly lightly armed: usually just one .50-caliber machine gun, often in a remote-controlled turret. Ugandan MRAPs are like wheeled battlecruisers. The RGs sport two machine guns; the Casspirs have three, plus a rifleman with his AK-47, crouched in the armored bed beside the turret gunners.
“We have the arsenal,” Paddy told me last week when I ran into him at the airport. He was explaining why I shouldn’t believe press reports saying one of his camps had been briefly overrun by insurgents. In fact, the bad guys got gunned down outside the walls.
The Ethiopians are the most feared army in Mogadishu, but the Ugandans are probably the best-protected – and rightly so. Theirs is essentially a defensive mission, holding onto that key real estate, hoping and praying for the day when the U.N. wakes up and sends its own peacekeepers. That’ll let the widely hated Ethiopians leave. And that might begin the slow process of returning peace to Mogadishu.
Full Wired article by David Axe here.
Be respectful of others and their opinions. Inflammatory remarks and inane leftist drivel will be deleted. It ain’t about free speech, remember you’re in a private domain. My website, my prerogative.
If you can't handle using your real email address, don't bother posting a comment.
those things look pretty tough. and the v-shape haul design being around 30 years is pretty impressive. I mean thats a simple design but what a huge impact it makes when a bomb goes off, really saves alot of lives
November 26th, 2007 at 7:39 pmYeah, methinks the US did some re-inventing of the wheel, there. Those SA rigs also cost about 1/10 of the US MRAPs.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:19 pmSometimes we think we’re all that and then we find we didn’t know shit.
November 27th, 2007 at 2:47 am