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Military casualties: 3 dead -- the army's chief medical officer and two aids.
Civilian bystander casualties: 5 dead -- no warning, no affiliation, no animosity, no threat, no point.
1. McDill, Stuart. "Blast kills top Pakistani army medic." Video. Reuters, February 27, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
What the dead--Abukar Abdisalan, the brother of a Somali Federal government minister--had done:
1. Used a cell phone in view of a Presidential Guard soldier watching a crossroad on a convoy route taken by Somalia's Information Minister, Ahmed Abdisalan Adan;
2. When approached by soldiers, fled.
A soldier put a bullet through the back of Abukar Abdisalan's head as he ran.
With cell phones frequently used to trigger roadside bombs, I am sure the soldier would have been punished if he had not shot the escaping suspect.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
Whatever happens this week, this blog will be slower (even more behind the eightball) than usual: I am swimming through Raphael Patai's other book, The Jewish Mind.
While I work on that and photography, for those who may wish to learn more and enter discussion about Islam in reasonable to excellent English and within the purview of a dominant Islamic community:
"The Beacon Website is dedicated to those who seek wisdom and knowledge wherever it is"--front page, second paragraph.
Here, here!
The elder whose house was attacked was said to have given a radio interview last week in which he accused the Islamists of "invading" the region and restricting the freedoms of locals.
Militia hit the elder's house in Doble, a town northeast of the Kenyan and south of the Ethiopian border, with a rocket and then cordoned it with bullets as necessary to keep neighbors from becoming helpful.
Last week, according to the Reuters AlertNet post, "Islamist fighters targeted video and music shops and ordered sellers of khat, narcotic leaves chewed by many Somali men, to leave the town or be killed."
Weigh that "why" against crime, disease, displacement, famine.
Earlier this month, Medecins Sans Frontieres pulled 87 staff, it's entire contingent, out of Somalia in the aftermath of the murder of three staff by a roadside bomb.
While the world may want a much improved basic living standard for Somalians and reduced civil strife, one may note that Islamists, warlords, and state security forces have a) probably achieved parity as regards the possession of useful arms [3, suggested] and b) advantage, of a sort, goes to the warrior with the most audacious and least predictable plan, and, just as in Sudan, that includes raids against lesser armed and practically undefended locations.
Unlike the roving bands of the Sudan, however, Islamists and warlords alike have agendas, the growth of which threatens to make them visible and vulnerable. For the time being, hit-and-run suits to promote control of affected populations.
1. Ahmed, Sarha. "Fighting kills two in Somali border town." Reauters AlertNet, February 25, 2008.
2. AFP. "'Doctors Without Borders' organisation pulls out of Somalia." afp.google.com, February 1, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
What is the old saw . . . "If you don't like government, try living without it"?
To the Darfuri, the Janjaweed have become mad sheepdogs with weapons--best not to look for humanity, meaning, or purpose in the mayhem or murder: best to stop it cold or get away from it, both actions much easier said than done.
Opheera McDoom's sad beyond sad plea for deliverance that appeared in this morning's Reuters AlertNet [1] may hint at but not quite nail The Problem, but then well Hollywood should pay homage to the misery of the Sudan, man's finest demonstration of virtually unimpeded, self-centered, narcissistic, pleasure-seeking, euphoria-inducing violence on earth.
State martial vanity with its caps and braids, spit polish and ribbons, has nothing on the revolutionary's vanity--these days beard, kefiya, Kalashnikov, and a fierce stare--and neither competes with a bandit's bandolier for macho strut.
Not for nothing did T. E. Lawrence put on Arab robes.
Arm the civilians or arm them with many armies--certainly arm a hardy, reliable, and responsible few with satellite-linked signalling alarms to call in those armies on contact, for no "political solution" exists where no legitimate political cause exists either.
Suffering in Sudan will continue as it would before any other malign force of nature inappropriately addressed.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/photos/ss/events/wl/20070811_somalia
The government's behind walls; the people are constantly exposed to warfare--and would that fighting were the only unnatural killer across the land: the pictures tell the story of battered streets, desparate souls, and starvation.
For intellectuals old and new, there are a few pictures of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, billed, more or less, as the Dutch lawmaker, and one of her with philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.
-33-
Action: Weapons confiscation.
Assets: 3 "battlewagons" burned.
Casualties: 15 government troops--7 dead, 8 wounded.
Most striking paragraph:
"A senior commander of the Islamists' Shabab youth wing, Muktar Ali Robow, led rebels equipped with rocket propelled grenades and machineguns as they outgunned government troops in Dinsoor early on Sunday." [2]
Most puzzling phrase: "It was unclear why the Islamists briefly took over the town . . . ."
My hypothesis: discourage government forces; pacify the town; go home with weapons.
The conventional officer would say, "Stand and fight!"
The guerrilla leader instead says, "Strike and melt away."
Well . . . it works.
Accounts differ slightly.
Reuters AlertNet reports three battlewagons--usually small trucks equipped with machine guns--burned. Agence France-Presse notes in parallel or through additional witness's observation: "I saw Islamists driving four Somali government armed vehicles after the troops fled." [1]
In Somalia and elsewhere, conventional engagements yield ambiguous outcomes (except for the dead--there's nothing ambiguous about what has just happened to them).
While "firepower" counts for any combatant, the variables that overarch all are "information" and "relationships", and information withheld--i.e., the tactical secret--turns out the strongest armor while related "cloaked" relationships produce their certain level of aggressive potency in the form of ambush.
The guerrilla's eternal paradox: invisibility survives; visibility draws fire.
1. AFP. "Somali Islamists wrest control of southern township." Yahoo Canada, February 24, 2008.
2. "Somali Islamists kill 7 govt troops in southern town." Reuters AlertNet, February 24, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
The public relations and the numbers will certainly go back and forth, but for guerrillas against forces far larger than themselves, the tit-for-tat always turns out tit-for-zap.
Guerrilla movement work best in hit-and-run mode, also "beneath the radar" and "invisible." An army that cannot see its enemy cannot kill its enemy.
However, slip into the transition from a guerrilla confrontation to a conventional scenario--then watch out for the attack helicopters, the tanks, and the troops that however young and questionable nonethleless keep arriving in numbers greater than one's own.
We live in the age of "tactical nuclear arms", but we have seen none yet used, and thank God for that: the response to hegemony in conventional war has been clandestine war, hidden war, and small war--guerrilla warfare and terrorism. Whatever the Turkish losses in this latest incursion into northern Iraq, the PKK rebels lose their numbers, and with near autonomous statehood and trade, those "troops" are hard to replace.
So far in the Islamic Small Wars, as I call them, volunteer enthusiasm has been dim to nonexistant.
Hezbollah vs. Israel: Lebanon, much less the Arab world at large, found no cause to rise to the occasion.
Fatah al-Islam vs. Lebanon: neither Lebanon, nor any other entity in the area, found cause to rise to that occasion either, not even the much marginalized camp Palistinians of Nahr al-Bared, whose defenses against an imaginary Israeli invasion were in fact overrun and put to use by an Islamist invasion and subsequently destroyed--and this representing the homes of some 31,000 or so residents--by the state's general warfare against the invasion farce.
Mogadishu, Somalia saw six months to a year's worth of Islamic Courts rule, and it disappeared within weeks of a combined Federal government and Ethiopian Army offensive.
Today, quite able to continue the business of lobbing grenades into theaters, killing teenagers for watching, say, the World Cup championship on television, and assassinating public officials when they answer the door to their homes, it too has failed to garner the support of The People, much less so any of the "war lords" who have other troubles on their minds, not the least of which may have to do with finding their way out of the horror they themselves have brought to their country.
Sometimes in history, the fireworks of war--the battles and bombs, raids and public death marches, hangings, and beheadings--turn out the expression of the end of affairs that were over before they began.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban survived merely weeks in the face of the U.S. invasion, and although it persists . . . it's ill-prepared for running bus lines and hospitals, hotels and factories. It had its chance, even beheading the criminal by Shari'a standards in Kabul's stadium, and yet The People did not join with it. This is not to suggest the Karzai government has turned out all that wonderful for its people but rather to note the disparity between what's in an actor's head and what's really going on in the audience's heart.
The PKK is about the Kurds, not Islam, but it shares with extremist Islam the romance of unicultural sovereignty, an ideal more difficult to achieve everywhere in the world, even in Kosovo from a Serbian standpoint, than it has ever been.
We are universally bound by electronic signals plus the common adoption virtually worldwide of English. For exception, China perphaps stands as sentinel, but Burma certainly, and look at what that junta has had to do to remain in power.
The world wants peace.
Some part of It will have to get over their old clannish, tribal, racist psychology, but I think the world will have its peace--and prosperity--one stable nation and one failed romantic counterrevolution at a time.
1. "Turkish army says rebel death toll in N. Iraq at 112." Reuters AlertNet, February 24, 2008.
2. "Tactical Nuclear Weapon." Wikipedia, as experienced February 24, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
http://www.meforum.org/article/1858
Above all, please, if you comment here or write me, have integrity.
Cinnamon Stillwell has been writing for a few years out of San Francisco, and I trust her--so should you.
This is a pass-along, i.e., reading I think you would enjoy.
"I became a journalist because I wanted to travel, but I’m not sure why I chose war. I wish I could say it was some noble calling, but I think mainly it was adventure. It was Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and tales of the "Great Game" that drew me to Afghanistan."
It has a classic ring to it.
Check out the Guardian Weekly, "Dispatches from the Afghan front": http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=515&catID=7.
