War Is Boring

by PETER DOERRIE Mali The regional repercussions of the fall of Gadhafi are beginning to come clear as Tuareg militants attacked a total of six towns since Jan. 17. The Azawad National Liberation Movement (MNLA) — the group responsible for the attacks — has been formed only recently and is believed to have many former [...]

by ROBERT BECKHUSEN Coming off last year’s Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the special operations community has rarely ridden higher. But the resonance of the Somalia raid is, perhaps, singular. Somalia has a totemic significance for many in the special-operations community, thanks to the 1993 debacle — even as they’ve slowly grown more comfortable quietly operating in the country. The [...]

Côte d’Ivoire
Soldiers killed seven youths over the last few days. The incident occurred in Vavoua, some 450 kilometers away from Abidjan. As a young man tried to avoid a roadblock of the national army — which many Ivorians accuse of leveraging illegal taxes and tolls at such roadblocks — he was chased by soldiers and beaten to death. The next day, some hundred local youths marched towards an army camp, armed with clubs and rifles. In what authorities described as “losing control,” some of the soldiers started shooting and killed six further young men.

A nearly disastrous daylight raid by U.S. Special Forces in Somalia four years ago ended with a surprising intervention by a U.S. Navy warship — and illustrates the largely unheralded role the Navy’s vessels are playing in the ongoing American intervention in Somalia.

Democratic Republic of Congo
Monday saw the first presidential and parliamentary elections since 2006 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Stakes were high in the single-round elections, with eight presidential and 18,000 parliamentary candidates on the ballots. The run-up towards election day was tense, with frequent clashes between security forces and supporters of UDPS candidate Étienne Tshisekedi in urban centers. On the final campaign weekend alone, up to 10 people died in the capital of Kinshasa.

For the small team of U.S. Navy and Air Force commandos in northern Somalia on June 1, 2007, it must have seemed like history repeating itself. While hunting Islamic terrorists in the town of Bargal, the commandos had been pinned down by gunfire. Fourteen years earlier, a similar situation had resulted in the deaths of 18 U.S. servicemembers in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital — a tragedy that’s the subject of the book and movie Black Hawk Down.

The threat of drone attacks was all that protected CIA agents in the early years of the Agency’s continuing efforts to take out al-Qaeda operatives in Somalia. The thing is, the threat was a hollow one. The drones weren’t there.

Democratic Republic of Congo
The DRC will hold presidential elections in December and tensions run high in the country that is still in the process of emerging from decades of violence and civil war. Clashes between demonstrators and security forces with injured and dead happen on a regular basis in many parts of the country. The volatile east of the country, where the government still has only little control outside the larger cities, has experienced an escalation of violence, partly caused by a hasty relocation of newly trained army units into areas currently controlled by competing rebel factions. And as security in neighboring Burundi deteriorates, Burundian opposition forces based in the DRC have committed several brutal attacks against perceived supporters of the Burundian government.

Two weeks into Kenya’s risky attack on Somali extremists, the Kenyan military is warning civilians to expect air raids in the vicinity of 10 Somali towns. The heads-up itself is not unusual. What is unusual is the medium: Twitter, the short messaging service.

Second-hand F-5 jet fighters belonging to the tiny, untested Kenyan air force are spearheading a risky Kenyan invasion of southern Somalia aimed at destroying a Somali terror group.

by DAVID AXE One Somali official told The Associated Press that during the fight for Deynile [neighborhood in Mogadishu, Burundi] lost between 30 and 50 soldiers in a single day.