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Saturday, July 29, 2006

Second Front

Oh great. Somalia is bad enough with the Islamic Courts Movement running around. And now Eritrea, still smarting after their defeat in a war with Ethiopia back in 1999 (?), is treating Somalia like a new front against Ethiopia:

A Kazakh Il-76 jet transport, apparently carrying weapons, from Eritrea, for the Islamic Courts, landed at the Mogadishu airport. This was only the second time a large aircraft had landed at the airport in the last decade.

The Ethiopians have moved thousands of troops in Somalia to prop up the nominal and official government in the face of ICU threats. I still wonder if Ethiopia moved in with our encouragement and our possible cooperation. A small number of special forces attached to relatively well trained (compared to their opponents) Ethiopian troops could smash up the armed trucks ("technicals") used by the ICU to intimidated other war lords into cooperating.

It isn't like Eritrea doesn't have enough problems without looking for more trouble.