But for decades — as the government imploded, warlords took over, more warlords came and an Islamist insurgency swept across Somalia — Dr. Abdi has persevered, offering a refuge for thousands of families driven from their homes by relentless street battles.
The Taliban originally came to prominence in Kandahar when they intervened in a fight between two pedophile warlords over the possession of a coveted dancing boy.
The result is that Libya has become a patchwork of factions whose continued presence - one that appears to be empowering warlords over elected officials - makes it difficult to ensure the establishment and maintenance of a single body of law that can apply equally and to all.
In Kandahar, in 1994, for instance, Mullah Naqib Ullah, then the area's ruling warlord, peacefully handed over power to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's spiritual leader and a member of the Hotak, a very small Pashtun clan.
MOVIES -- Mongol: The Rise Of Genghis Khan ($27.98; New Line) is the first of three movies about the empire builder (or warlord if he took over your country) and it's a very old-fashioned biopic in both the good and bad sense of that term.
And then, on 5 March, he released Kony2012, a 30-minute film that explained why the world needed to catch and bring to justice Joseph Kony, a central African warlord, who, over the previous 26 years, had abducted 30,000 children and turned them into soldiers and sex slaves.
At a sign from the local warlord presiding over the games, Afghan riders helped the Americans mount.
Much of the mayhem seems to be unfolding before the gaze of America's wartime allies, the Uzbek warlords who took over when the Taliban collapsed.
Her revulsion for the wild men of the Red Army as they rape and kill, for the corrupt warlords who take over in Grozny, for Vladimir Putin and his value-free Russia, for fellow journalists who play fellow travellers, is constant and corrosive.
This time, the sword-wielding heroes are pitted against a ruthless Japanese warlord intent on taking over the Chinese throne.
