This past week, terrorists struck Westgate Mall in Nairobi. Al Shabaab, a Somali Islamist organization, claimed responsibility. Frustratingly, we still know very little about the attackers, their origins, or the Kenyan security forces’ response. And the news about the...
Al-Shabaab, the Islamic insurgency wreaking havoc in Somali, appears to have joined Twitter. The @HSMPress (Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen press office) feed has a trickle of followers and posts...
If you find the argument that famine is man-made to be credible, then famine is not just an inevitable outcome of the structural conditions of "failed states" but rather it is purposeful,...
From the AP:"Somali pirates on Wednesday hijacked a U.S.-flagged cargo ship with 20 American crew members onboard, hundreds of miles from the nearest U.S. military vessel in some of the most...
Finally, a resolution to the four-month-old stand-off with the hijackers of the Faina off the coast of Somalia. NY Times reported today that the pirate crew will disembark from the Faina after some sum of money, paid by the ship owners, was air-dropped onboard: "According to one of the pirates, the owners of the ship had paid the ransom; the pirates had counted the money; and now they were just waiting for nightfall to slip away from the ship.The hijacking of the Ukrainian ship, called the Faina, stirred up fears of a new epoch of piracy and helped precipitate a rash of similar attacks off...
This post began as a response to the comments on Peter's recent post on pirates, but they got to be so long, and required hyperlinks, I decided to start a new thread. In his comment to that post, T. Greer asks what the pirates who hijacked the oiltanker Sirius Star were thinking, since they can't deal with the logistics involved in selling the cargo and were certainly likely to provoke the great powers (further) by targeting such a prize. Somali pirates want two things, as far as I can tell: 1) Money, which is why their strategies have been based on ransom demands - they don't care about...
AP reports, in an article titled "Somali Pirates Stare Down Superpowers":With a Russian frigate closing in and a half-dozen U.S. warships within shouting distance, the pirates holding a tanker off Somalia's coast might appear to have no other choice than to wave the white flag. But that's not how it works in Somalia, a failed state where a quarter of children die before they turn 5, where anybody with a gun controls the streets and where every public institution has crumbled. The 11-day standoff aboard the Ukrainian MV Faina begs the question: How can a bunch of criminals from one of the...
No sooner did I blog about the growing security threat posed by maritime piracy than several powerful militaries took notice... not because I was particularly persuasive, but because a Ukranian freighter loaded down with $30 million worth of tanks, grenade launchers and other military equipment was captured by marauders off the coast of Somalia.Two dozen crew members are still hostage aboard the MV Faina, now anchored off the Somali coast, while the pirates repeatedly isuse a series of ransom demands - though it's not obvious to me to whom. (Also, their demands have fallen, like the global...
Rodger and Peter remind us that many things are happening out there besides the commotion between Russia and Georgia. For example:Canada has dispatched the naval frigate HMCS Ville de Québec to the waters off the Horn of Africa, in the hopes of stemming pirate attacks that have in recent months drastically curtailed the delivery of humanitarian aid to Somalia’s war-affected masses. It's unclear whether a single additional vessel will be up to the task, even if its mission is to rather single-mindedly protect World Food Programme shipments, rather than to police the waters more generally....
UN humanitarian co-ordinator Marc Bowden says that Somalia is in the grips of a worsening food crisis.Somalia faces a worse situation than Darfur, Mr Bowden says.Contributing to the crisis are fighting between rival militias, successive droughts, sharply rising food prices and a collapse of the Somali currency.Mr Bowden says that during the course of the next three months the number of people needing emergency food relief will climb by about one million from the current 2.5m.Aid agencies trying to get food into Somalia face extreme difficulties.The task is made more difficult because...
Ethiopia launched an invasion of Somalia yesterday:Ethiopia officially plunged into war with Somalia’s Islamist forces on Sunday, bombing targets inside Somalia and pushing ground troops deep into Somali territory in a major escalation that could turn Somalia’s internal crisis into a violent religious conflict that engulfs the entire Horn of Africa.The coordinated assault was the first open admission by Ethiopia’s Christian-led government of its military operations inside Somalia, where — with tacit American support — it has been helping a weak interim government threatened by forces loyal...