War Is Boring

Tuareg refugees face the threat of reprisal from the new regime in southern Mali in addition to poverty, starvation and disease.

A campaign of kidnapping that began at sea with Somali pirates has expanded onto land and across Somalia’s borders. Pirates and their allies in the Somali terror group al-Shabab have begun targeting tourists and aid workers in Kenya and Puntland, a mostly self-governing region in northern Somalia.

“Yesterday we visited one of the biggest tent camps in Port-au-Prince,” Matt Bors writes.

One of Matt Bors’ sketches from Haiti. He returns to the U.S. next week.

Fresh off my collaboration with artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner on “Boom!”, my true story of getting blown up in Afghanistan, I’m now hard at work with artist Tim Hamilton on a book-length comic about the war in Congo.

Famine-stricken areas of Somalia dominated by Al Qaeda-linked Al Shabab have limited access for international aid groups.

by DAVID AXE With at least 2 million displaced people, Congo has one of the world’s largest populations of those who have lost their homes and fled their villages. Until recently, the patterns of displacement were fairly predictable. But this summer, refugees came from an unexpected direction, forcing humanitarians to adapt. The news in May [...]

There are just a few hundred fighters from the Lord’s Resistance Army in the vicinity of Dungu, in northeastern Congo just south of Sudan. These few fighters, traveling in bands of six or so men and camped deep in the forest, have killed thousands of people in recent years and displaced some 300,000. Rarely have so few caused so much suffering for so many.

On Wednesday, May 5, fighters from the Somali Islamic group Hizbul Islam attacked the country’s largest private refugee camp, the Dr. Hawa Abdi camp outside Mogadishu. A Hizbul Islam fighter died, alongside at least one camp security guard and reportedly eight children who were in critical condition in the Medicins San Frontieres camp clinic at the time of the attack. Around 20 camp staff were held hostage. This included, briefly, Abdi herself.

It was a rare refuge in a country that had known only war for 19 years: In Afgooye, a town just a few miles outside Mogadishu, the staff of the Dr. Hawa Abdi camp offered food, medical care and protection to as many as 6,000 Somali families at a time. Through two decades of war and occupation, the staff and its charismatic director carefully maintained their neutrality — and managed to preserve the camp’s delicate infrastructure despite the chaos that raged just beyond the walls.