Biography
Although born in Beledweyne in Somalia's central Hiran province, Aidid's Habr Gidir clan traditionally hails from Mudug region of Somalia, especially his Sacad subclan. He was educated in Rome and Moscow and served in the Italian colonial police force in the 1950s. Later he rose in the military of Mohamed Siad Barre to the rank of general and served in the 1977–78 Ogaden War with Ethiopia. Aidid also served in Barre's cabinet and as Somali ambassador to India before finally being appointed intelligence chief.
Read more about this topic: Mohamed Farrah Aidid
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)