Algeria Jihad Update. "Islamist guerilla fighters attack airport in southern Algeria," from Deutsche Presse Agentur:
Algiers - Islamist guerilla fighters damaged a plane during an attack at Djanet airport in the far south-eastern part of Algeria, press reports said Saturday. Security forces countered the attack which occurred in the early hours of Thursday morning.
According to El Watna daily, the attackers damaged an Air Algerie plane, while Le Soir d'Algerie said two helicopters and a military aircraft had been hit.
The attackers had arrived in three off-road vehicles with rocket launchers and machine guns and were able to escape across the border into Niger, the reports said.
The attack comes as the southern Algerian desert is entering the tourist high season.
Airport security precautions have been particularly strict since the kidnapping of tourists in 2003, and airports are guarded by the military.
It remained unclear whether the attackers tried to enter the airport site or whether they had only fired shots from a distance.
"The attack comes as the southern Algerian desert is entering the tourist high season."
-- from the article above
Apparently there still be foreigners crazed enough to visit Algeria, and crazed enough to travel in and around the Sahara, in some foolish completing an etape -- a bit too far off base, I'm afraid -- of the old Cairo-to-Capetown race, or Dakar-to-Durban. This is sheer greed: life-greed, the Greed for Experience. It is not admirable. It is not to be encouraged. No need to swell your life-list of countries visited, like some vaunting ornithologist listing the birds he's managed to see.
Too many people roaming around too many places, too often not out of scientific curiosity or necessity, but merely so that they can have gone somewhere others have not gone, and tell those others about it. In the case of those Europeans, who end up visiting such places as southern Algeria, they may, if seized ahd held for ransom, cause their own government a headache, and perhaps even force it to pay ransom to the Muslim terrorists. Not good.
Stay home. Don't go to Algeria, and cut down on your silly travel. Learn to sit quietly in a room. Learn to read a book. Learn to do watercolors. Learn how to talk. Do what people did, say, in Concord, Massachusetts round about 1850. Was everyone who lived before the 20th century, with all of its gewgaws, miserable? No. They managed to make their own happiness without running around quite so much.
Courses in The New Art of Living, light-carbon-footprint version, will be opening soon in a neighborhood near you, just as soon as I can get the boys at Blackstone -- or is Goldman Sachs? -- to help prepare my IPO.
Or is there anyone reading this who gets my drift and wants to invest right now, in the human capital being offered, without waiting for that IPO?
By all means. You know how to contact me.
Second, Hugh's post. Are they crazy? Should we have any sympathy for people who deliberately place themselves in harmful situations?
"Should we have any sympathy for people who deliberately place themselves in harmful situations?"
Outside of military and military contractors, I have no sympathy for people that knowingly choose to "visit" dangerous places.
Personally I turned down an offer to visit Scotland with my siblings, before the Glasgow bombings by underprivilaged doctors on an internal struggle. After that, they agreed with me and have decided to visit the Grand Canyon.
That's why we don't go to the urban ghettos-they're just as deadly as southern algeria, since they'll kill you just for being you, too.
Deliberate & unnecessary placement in a dangerous situation is stupid.