Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteSomalia
Last year and about a month before this time, journalist Mark Snelling hitched a ride through a portion of Somalia with a Red Crescent relief mission. [1] He filed three brief pages on the experience, and as I expected, he found a lovely country in disarray and disrepair.
I haven't yet found on the web what I would call strong, realtime coverage of fighting in Somalia and may assume that there's no one from the Fourth Estate taking pictures and notes with either guerrilla or government forces. Dangers posed by the former need not be reprised; restrictions imposed by the latter possibly have an "operations in progress" cast: the public's going to get what's "released" by news makers rather than what's observed up close and personal by news reporters. In that vein, Reuters has published a list of six "al Qaeda operatives or associates" the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation believes operating in Somalia. [2]
Missing in information: the results of shelling militant positions by a U.S. destroyer last week off the Puntland coast.
The disconnected dots would seem to say "six dead, six alive" out of an initial estimate of a landing involving 35 al Qaeda fighters.
That's the informational fog in war as it exists for the news reader.
Lebanon
Here's the lead from Nazih Siddiq's article in Reuters [3]: "Al Qaeda-inspired militants in north Lebanon threatened on Wednesday to take their fight to other parts of Lebanon and beyond if the Lebanese army did not stop attacking a Palestinian refugee camp."
Let's reflect a moment here: you rob a bank; the police chase you back to your sanctuary, guns blazing as you go; the army arrives to control the situation, which is your situation, of course, and you set up sniper positions to sap military personnel as the civilian evacuating begins and tedious negotiations and politics get under way to save lives; the army, applying heavier metal than you have, then grinds away at your positions until your sandbox turns into one square kilometer of wreckage, and the Palestinians who have elected to stay, a former and now middle-aged PLO terrorist, who has done his time, among them, revile you for endangering their lives and bringing this disaster down on their heads; at which point, you turn around and assert that you're defending them.
How?
1. Mark Snelling's May 2006 blog on traveling into Somalia: http://mobile.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/114794661372.htm.
2. Reauters. "FACTBOX: Key facts on hunted al Qaeda militants in Somalia." June 4, 2007: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSWAL25910720070604.
3. Siddiq, Nazih. "Islamists threaten to expand Lebanon camp war." Reuters, June 6, 2007: http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL0617693420070606.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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