The United States formally recognized the government of Somalia on Thursday for the first time in more than two decades, marking what the Obama administration declared was a major policy success in bringing that country back from near-collapse.
"Today's meeting has been a long time in the making," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said alongside Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud after the two met privately in Washington. "Four years ago, at the start of the Obama administration, Somalia was, in many ways, a different country than it is today," she said.
Somalia is known in America primarily as the scene of "Black Hawk Down," the book and movie that recounted the 1993 deaths of 18 U.S. military personnel during a battle in Mogadishu against fighters loyal to Somali clan leader Mohamed Farah Aidid. During the years that followed, U.S. intelligence operatives attempted to support various sides in clan warfare as an Islamist insurgent group, al-Shabab, grew in strength.