War Is Boring

“There is no other time than the night of The White House Correspondents Dinner when Washington is more out of touch with the country it guides and informs,” Wendy Button writes at The Huffington Post.

The assault on Somalia’s radio stations came from three directions.

On April 3, the Islamic armed group Hizbul Islam threatened to shut down FM radio stations in the areas it controls in the country’s south. The group accused the stations of playing music it deemed “un-Islamic.”

War Is Boring placed a blogger aboard the submarine USS Toledo in April last year. Read Bryan William Jones’ historic FIRST undersea blog series.

by UNA MOORE What follows is a cautionary tale, in time-line form, about the perils of investigating, reporting on, and responding to civilian casualty incidents in armed conflict. Dec. 26: An incident took place in a small village in Kunar province, northeastern Afghanistan, and Afghans were reportedly killed. Dec. 27: Local authorities claimed an air [...]

by DAVID AXE Bad move, Air Force. Last week, Colonel Kevin W. Bradley, commander of the 174th Fighter Wing in Syracuse, New York, invited media to see the wing’s new MQ-9 Reaper drones. Citing the controversy around lethal drone strikes in Pakistan and Africa, Bradley told his airmen not to give their last names to [...]

by DAVID AXE Mohamed Omar Hussein, our man in Mogadishu, was at the Shamo Hotel covering a graduation ceremony for medical students, pictured, when a suicide bomber dressed as a woman sneaked in and blew himself up, killing potentially scores of people, including several government ministers and two journalists. Hussein, a reporter with Somali Weyn, [...]

by DAVID AXE A suicide bomber struck the Shamo Hotel in Mogadishu today, during a graduation ceremony for a Somali university. At least 19 people died, including three government ministers, several doctors and two reporters. One of the reporters was from Radio Shabelle, an outfit that earlier this year saw its director killed and a [...]

by DAVID AXE Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan, the freelance journalists from Canada and Australia, respectively, have been freed after some 15 months in captivity in Somalia. Their kidnappers, allegedly criminal gangs with ties to insurgent group Al Shabab, demanded $1 million apiece in ransom. Some ransom was paid, although how much is not clear. [...]

by DAVID AXE The ground rules for embedding with U.S. forces in Afghanistan include a prohibition on photographing damaged U.S. armored vehicles, specifically the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected trucks designed to resist roadside bombs. The idea, in part, is to keep from the Taliban any material that might be used for propaganda purposes. After all, these MRAPs [...]

It was a war we thought we’d won. But after eight years of escalating violence, the Afghanistan conflict has morphed into something perhaps unwinnable. U.S.-led forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to deny sanctuary to Al Qaeda, a goal we’ve largely achieved. But in years of occupation, Washington has apparently conflated counter-terrorism with nation-building. Now the [...]

An interview with Somali journalist Ahmed Omar Hashi by DAVID AXE Ahmed Omar Hashi was no stranger to death threats. As a senior producer for Mogadishu’s popular Shabelle Radio, Hashi routinely reported on Somalia’s bloody, eighteen-year civil war, and all the bitter politics that accompany it. By 2007, he was regularly receiving threats, by phone [...]

by DAVID AXE Over the weekend New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell, a Brit, pictured, was kidnapped in northern Afghanistan along with his interpreter Sultan Munadi. He was freed in a British commando raid on Wednesday. Munadi and one commando were killed. I worked alongside Farrell in southern Iraq in 2006, during his pre-Times days. [...]