Global jihad's new front in Africa - As Islamists take over Somalia, its Western-backed neighbor Eth

[applegrove]

Global jihad's new front in Africa
As Islamists take over Somalia, its Western-backed neighbor Ethiopia prepares for war.
By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Monday, 12/11/06

ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – "A new front in the global struggle for Islamist rule is emerging in Africa. And there are worrisome signs that battles between Somalia's rising Union of Islamic Courts (IUC) and the country's foundering Western-backed government might soon engulf the entire Horn of Africa in a regional war.

Last week, the UN Security Council voted to send peacekeeping forces to Somalia, a move the Islamists say would be met with holy war. But neighboring Ethiopia isn't waiting for the UN. As the Islamists continue to take town after town away from Somalia's transitional government, and to march closer to its border, Ethiopia is gearing up for all-out war. Meanwhile, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Sudan are eyeing the conflict and taking sides.

"The fact that the UN resolution was backed by the US suggests that it puts Somalia into the global war on terror, and that has the potential to mobilize a lot of countries and groups that have been divorced from Somalia thus far," says Matt Bryden a consultant with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

Ethiopia has been sending troops across the border for months and its parliament last week approved a resolution of self-defense against Somalia in the event of war.

............SNIP"

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1212/p01s02-woaf.html

[applegrove]

1. Here we go. The third world war the neocons want. Makes me sick.

[The Magistrate]

2. Hardly, Sir

Ethiopia has been fighting the Somalis off and on for at least a thousand years. There has generally been a religious component, and imperial control from Addis Adaba at trimes has extended over Somalia. Matters hardened somewhat towards the end of nineteenth century when Italy, France, and England secured control of the Somalias. Native troops from Italian Somaliland provided the bulk of Mussolini's forces in the Abyssinian War of '36, which has not gone unforgotten in Ethiopia.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. West could be sucked into new battleground

Watching Somalia right now is like standing on a beach, waiting for a category five hurricane to hit. The looming cataclysm threatens to spark a regional war, suck in east African and Arab actors, and create a dangerous new theatre in the polarising, global contest between western power and Islamist jihadism. Somalia has the potential to make Darfur look like a little local difficulty.

The cocked trigger for all-out conflict is a deadline set by the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a movement of growing military and popular strength that controls the capital, Mogadishu, and most of southern Somalia. If Ethiopia does not abandon the rump, western-backed government that holds the central town of Baidoa and withdraw its troops by Tuesday, the Islamists say they will attack. Several thousand Ethiopian soldiers are said to have entered the country in recent months, with tacit US backing.

"After months of preparations and posturing, both sides are now poised for a decisive battle," said Matt Bryden, former Horn of Africa director for the International Crisis Group, writing in Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper. After decades of misrule, conflict and, most recently, the worst floods in living memory, Somalia faced "an even greater calamity: war on unprecedented scale".

The implications reach far beyond Somalia's largely disputed borders, Mr Bryden said. "Both sides paint their confrontation in ideological terms. The transitional federal government and Ethiopia have cast Somalia as an emerging front in the 'global war on terror' in order to attract support from western capitals. Likewise, the Courts have attracted sympathy from across the Islamic world by portraying themselves as victims of Ethiopian aggression and western Islamophobia."
...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldbriefing/story/0,,1972620,00.html