In Somalia, a former leader of the Islamic Courts Union has been elected president two years after US-backed Ethiopian troops invaded Somalia in an attempt to end Islamist rule. Over the past two years, more than 16,000 people have died, and one million people were displaced. Sheikh Sharif Ahmed is seen as a moderate Islamist leader and as someone who might be able to unite Somalia’s warring clans. The New York Times reports that with the selection of Sheik Sharif Ahmed, Somalia has come nearly full circle to where it was in the summer of 2006, when an Islamist alliance seized control of Mogadishu and pacified it for the first and only time since the country’s central government imploded in 1991.