Somalia: The World's forgotten catastrophe

Khalid Abdullahi lives down a winding dusty track, among cactus trees and chickens pecking at the rubbish piled up against rusting corrugated iron walls. In this anonymous corner of Mogadishu, a city destroyed a dozen times over in the past 17 years, he shares a dirt-floored shack with more than 20 brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, a niece and nephews.

Khalid was nine the day his father died in 1993. "We were sitting here in this room when we heard a big noise," he says. The "big noise" was the sound of an American Black Hawk helicopter being shot down and crashing into Khalid's house.

Eighteen US Army Rangers were killed in the firefight that followed. Their broken bodies were dragged through Mogadishu's battle-scarred streets. An estimated 1,000 Somalis died that day too, although they didn't get a Hollywood film made about them.

The US had been leading a United Nations peacekeeping mission but following the Black Hawk Down incident US troops pulled out. The rest of the UN mission soon followed and Somalia was left to slide back into anarchy.

Propped up against the wall, hidden behind a mattress, is the nose cone of the Black Hawk. Khalid pulls it out and places the piece of black fibre-glass in the middle of the room. "The Americans said they were helping us," he says. I ask him whether he thinks they did. Khalid just smiles and doesn't answer.

There are no Black Hawk helicopters in Mogadishu today. No UN tanks patrolling the streets. But 15 years on, the United States is back in Somalia. CIA agents are operating in Mogadishu. Unmanned Predator drones circle above the city gathering intelligence. US forces have carried out at least four attacks inside the country in the past 12 months. Civilians in Somalia and neighbouring Kenya have been "extraordinarily rendered" to prisons in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, where they have been interrogated by US officials.

Somalia: U.S. Warships Disembark at Coast