Obviously, violence and madness in Somalia is nothing new. Black Hawk Down, anyone? However, things have changed of late, as radical Islamists move ever closer to taking complete control of the strife-ridden country. I have been negligent in pointing this out, so here’s the latest bit o’ news that should boost the Somali tourist industry.
Islamic fighters in the Somali port of Kismayo opened fire yesterday on residents who were burning tyres, throwing stones and chanting to protest against their takeover of the city hours earlier.
A 13-year-old boy was shot dead and two other people were injured as violence raged for several hours in Somalia’s third biggest city, witnesses said.
Click to learn more…“We have been taken over by extremists, the Islamic courts have taken us by force, and now they are firing at us,” said Dahabo Dirie, a protester.
The Mogadishu-based Islamic militiamen poured into Kismayo overnight to extend their grip on south-central Somalia and effectively flank the powerless central government on three sides.
Ministers accused the militias of mounting the offensive using fighters from Eritrea, Pakistan and Yemen.
“There are foreign forces … which attacked Kismayo,” Hussein Mohamed Farah Aideed, the Somali interior minister said.
A militia official, who spoke to a crowd in Kismayo before the protests began, said the movement was receiving help from abroad, but did not specify.
Unfortunately, the kinds of tourists that developments such as this will draw are the radical Islamist expansionists and jihadists. Indeed, while the media blasts the clarion call of a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, that resurgence has only led to them dying by the bushel in much the same manner that they have in every one of their annual spring offensivepaloozas since they were swept from power. The only obvious differences this year is that they’ve garnered far more press for their strengthening and they are becoming martyrs in great numbers at the hands of so-called “second rate crusaders.”
Iran is an obvious problem, and its rulers seem willing to work with the al Queda-type terrorist groups … to a degree. They share a common enemy in the Great Satan, but both have extremely different views about their hopes for the world and the Middle East in the event of success.
Obviously, the radical Islamists that once found a home in Afghanistan, a home that harbored their training camps and allowed them to project their terror, are under too much pressure there now to be anything more than a threat against the westerners in that country. Likewise, they cannot find a strong base for their own growth in the long term in Iran. At this point, an Islamist seizure of Somalia would seem to be the best hope for a new base from which to train the jihadists and expand the bloodshed. Luckily, any such shift is something that has been in our game-planning for some time now.