More bad news for al-Shabaab: more resistance it can't starve into submission. "Ethiopian troops move into Somalia: witnesses," by Abdi Sheikh for the Associated Press, November 19:
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Scores of Ethiopian military vehicles pushed at least 80 km (50 miles) into neighbouring Somalia on Saturday, residents said, five weeks after Kenya entered Somalia to fight Islamist militants it blames for a wave of kidnappings on its soil.
"The Ethiopian troops, which are in convoys of armoured vehicles, come to us today, crossing from Balanbale district on the border," Gabobe Adan, an elder in the central town of Guriel told Reuters.
"They were in about 28 trucks and armed battle wagons - the armed vehicles are very big."
Other residents told Reuters that the Ethiopians had set up a base in Guriel and moved troops to other towns nearby.
Residents and officials in northeast Kenya later told Reuters that Ethiopian troops had also crossed through their towns and taken up positions near bases from where the Kenyan military is launching its offensive.
"We have seen Ethiopian troops. They are clearly known to us," a local named Lesamow Said told Reuters. "They arrived this evening at Damasa. Some of the soldiers crossed over to the Somalia side and started patrolling immediately."
People in the Kenyan town of Mandera, which is near both Somalia and Ethiopia, said the Ethiopians had passed through there in a convoy of 10 trucks and several armoured vehicles.
A spokesman for the Ethiopian government, Shimeles Kemal, would neither confirm nor deny the reports.
Another Ethiopian official told Reuters that an Ethiopian move to support the Kenyan assault on the al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab group was likely.
"There is a strong possibility that we will be sending troops to Somalia soon to support Kenya's operation against the al Shabaab extremists," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"Our deployment could either be implemented under the umbrella of AMISOM or under another form, such as a separate operation alongside Kenya," he said. [...]
Senior Kenyan government ministers have shuttled around the east Africa region this week and travelled to the Gulf to drum up political and financial support for a coordinated campaign to rout the rebels.
Some analysts say Ethiopia may want to take advantage of al Shabaab's withdrawal from the capital Mogadishu in August to wipe out a group it sees as a threat to its stability.
Since that pullout, the militants, who want to introduce a strict version of sharia law, have resorted to suicide attacks and guerrilla-style tactics against African Union troops.
Although Ethiopian troops regularly cross the border with Somalia, and it has admitted opening "humanitarian corridors" into the country that it says are for food relief, residents said the numbers and locations of the troops were unusual.
"I have seen about 30 Ethiopian military vehicles myself. They have entered," another Guriel resident, Farah Hussein, told Reuters. "We are very happy to see them -- it is a sign of putting an end to al Shabaab."...
Islam's borders are bloody. (Huntington)
Because it's a 'religion' that demands the blood of its victims. It is a 'religion' that spreads by war and conflict.
Peaceful Islam! My a**!
Actually, it just occurs to me that the best solution to the Somalia problem may be to let Ethiopia and Kenya each annex their respective halves of Somalia and just put an end to an independent Somalia.
Interesting. It's good to see African countries attempting to sort out their own regional problems without external intervention.
Alas, instability in the Muslim world is being used as one of the pretexts for opening up the borders of EU member states still further to mass Muslim immigration, and the Euromed process endorses cultural initiatives such as the following, where Islam is propagandised to innocent indigenous German children in kindergarten. This video is nauseating: http://durotrigan.blogspot.com/2011/11/eu-diktat-open-your-borders-to-mass.html
I expect that the European Union Organization for Human Rights and the International Court in the Hague will bring charges against the Kenyan and Ethiopian officials who do what they have to do to wipe out the Somalian terrorists. Part of the price of subjecting national authority is that civilized societies no longer have the ability to defend themselves adequately against asymmetrical warfare groups.
We may expect to see an ever increasing number of charges brought in the future against fighters on whichever side is not favored by the "internationalists" on the Court and the various "Rights" commissions of the European Union. Is there any doubt that but for the support of the US, Israeli officials would long ago have been charged with human rights abuses?
Is there any doubt that but for the support of the US, Israeli officials would long ago have been charged with human rights abuses?
Israel is constantly charged with that by the Israel/Jew hating clever...Israel was attacked by numerous Arab/Mahoundian forces the first day of it's existence, in 1948, and several times since...There has been a war against Israel continuously to one degree or another since 1948...When you are defending yourself for your very survival,you don't worry about human rights...If five guys attacked me on the street, their human rights are the last thing I'm going to worry about...I'm going to violate their human rights the best I can...Israel deserves applause for being civilized enough to keep human rights offenses to a minimum...
Roh Roh...a Muslims worst nightmare...people willing to resist...
duh,
I agree with you completely. My point was that organizations such as the European Union and the UN are constantly attacking the measures that countries take to protect their borders and their societies.
I would prefer that countries deal with such resolutions as you would, by ignoring them. Unfortunately, European countries are implementing measures such as open borders and suppression of the right to criticize Islam, which are primary objectives of internationalist bodies such as the European Union.
This may be a good thing. Ethiopia is primarily Orthodox Christian and is said to have possession of the Ark of the Covenant. A little Christianity in the region may be a good move. As for Somalia some form of government maybe better than its current "Failed Government." The people may find some help for their current state of affairs.
exsgtbrown wrote: "Roh Roh...a Muslims worst nightmare...people willing to resist..."
YES! "people willing to resist" - every bullies' "worst nightmare," and that will be the planet's solution to the modern jihad resurgence. Or. Else.
Sometimes, I feel like reading JW is a hopeful search for evidence of determined resistance. Hoping especially to see signs of a turnaround, the tipping point, a change in the trend. Right now "people willing to resist," are like a panda or rare bird that we may rarely catch a glimpse of through binoculars. Oh look, there's actually some "people willing to resist" in a corner of east Africa now. Look quick, before they vanish. But fortunately, "people willing to resist" aren't completely unicorn rare, like the "moderate muslim."
Doing this birdwatching, we have to constantly ignore the huge noisy flocks of jihadis, their sympathetic lefty allies (who nest in the media, schools, etc), and especially masses of apathetic types glued to TV etc, and others that swarm around. All the while, our eyes are peeled for "people willing to resist."
Clearly, we have to become the change we want to see.
(Oh, I'm sorry! Robert, you should ban me for that! I'll just stop now.)
The core of Ethiopia (or Abyssinia, as it was once called) is a massive mountain plateau, originally forest and high-altitude grassland, where the Blue Nile rises (so, plenty of water). It is, in other words, a natural fortress. And in that natural fortress Ethiopian Christianity - which dates waaay back to the earliest centuries of the Christian church - was able to hold its own against a surrounding sea of Islam. Just. (At one point in the later Middle Ages, or early Renaissance, they did get a bit of help from the Portuguese; who also were quite happy to help out the Thais in a little matter of crushing incursions from Acehnese Muslim pirates, in SE Asia). They knew how to fight Muslims, even though there was a Muslim minority within their country.
In James Parkes' 'Whose Land?' which covers the period of Islamic rule over eretz Israel in some detail, there is an intriguing story. In the mid-15th century whichever Muslim honcho was in power was annoyed with resistance he was experiencing from western Christians. He decided to indulge in some collective punishment of the dhimmi Christians in the Holy Land...indeed, there was a distinct possibility he was about to wipe them all out, demolish all the churches, etc. Until he got a tart letter from the guy who was currently the King of Abyssinia. The (Christian) Abyssinian king informed the Muslim capo dei capi that should he proceed with what he intended against the Christians of the Holy Land, then he (the King of Abyssinia) would kill every Muslim then resident in Abyssinia, and demolish every mosque.
It must have been a very convincing letter; anyway, the Muslim ceased and desisted, and the Christian dhimmis in eretz Israel could breathe just a little bit easier.
Irritatingly, Parkes did not give a precise reference for this *fascinating* and very instructive story.
Is there anybody out there who can point us to an English-language - or even a French-language - Standard History of Abyssinian/ Ethiopia In Medieval Times that could give us some more details. I'd like to know more about that particular king!
I have a feeling that there must be a LOT of stories from Ethiopian history - from the 7th century to the 19th - that must be at least as dramatic as the stories of Charles Martel at Tours, or the Knights of St John at Malta, or Lepanto, or Vienna 1683; stories of heroic defences mounted against howling Mohammedan mobs, and battles hardly won, that preserved a remnant of Christian African civilisation in the mountain fastnesses. We need to start digging up those stories and making them better known. They would contain useful lessons about what to do - in the case of victories - and what *not* to do - in the case of the tragic setbacks.
Shoring up modern Ethiopia is a good thing for the West to do. If Ethiopia can stand as a majority non-Muslim nation ruled by non-Muslims and if it can remain in a strong alliance with other majority non-Muslim nations - newborn South Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania - that's northeast Africa held for free non-Muslim humanity.
I say to all Christians: support, to the hilt, the work that groups like the Bible Society and Barnabas Fund are doing in Ethiopia, and in the rest of East Africa. I will note that news that trickles back discreetly through Barnabas Fund and other sources suggests that there is a steady flow of conversions to Christianity, from various Muslim minorities in that part of the world. The more of the local as-yet-relatively-slack Muslims in places like Ethiopia or Kenya or Uganda convert to Christianity and are *thoroughly* discipled, the better. Such conversions happen much more readily when people hear the Christian scriptures in their mother tongue - Christianity's huge trump card over ruthlessly Arabocentric Islam. I say 'hear' because the beauty of modern technology is that you don't have to wait till people learn to read; once you've got a mother-tongue translation, then you put it over the radio or on an audio playback device and the illiterate and/ or vision-impaired can sop it up while they go about their daily subsistence tasks.
Everything that fosters healthy civil society amongst the Christianised tribes of East Africa is to the good (for example, support the Mothers' Union), as is everything that enables their farmers and gardeners to ride out droughts and produce enough food for their populations; because they need to be strong and numerous in order to hold off the forces of Jihad. And they need to be grimly Islamosavvy - they need Mr Spencer's books in their university and high school libraries, preferably in the main local languages as well as in the original English.
further thoughts. During World War II, Orde Wingate - who is most famous for the training work he did with the Haganah, teaching them how to effectively punish - and therefore, deter - Arab Muslim raiders - did some brilliant work in Ethiopia against the Axis forces. He created from local Ethiopian Christian fighters a group he called 'The Gideon Force'. I hope there are records of what they did, and that there are old men in Ethiopia who can remember how that operated. Because I think the non-Muslim Ethiopians, Kenyans, Ugandans and Tanzanians today, and the South Sudanese, could use Orde Wingate's principles. They need to find out who remembers what he taught and what he did, both in eretz Israel in the 1930s and in Ethiopia, and then they could use that knowledge to shape their defence against the Jihad - both that which is waged from Somalia or North Sudan, and that which is waged informally by the 'restive' Muslim minorities in their midst.
John
you wrote - "Actually, it just occurs to me that the best solution to the Somalia problem may be to let Ethiopia and Kenya each annex their respective halves of Somalia and just put an end to an independent Somalia."
I'm not so sure that's a good idea, because then they would end up with a *huge* Mohammedan Fifth Column within their new borders; and they *already* each have a large-ish and dangerous Mohammedan Fifth Column, as it is. They do not want their demographic to tip any further in favour of Muslims than it already has. Ethiopia is already in danger.
In purely realpolitik terms, both Kenya and Ethiopia would be better off evicting most or all of their *current* Mohammedan Fifth Column (many of whom are ethnically Somali) into Somalia, and then sealing and massively fortifying the borders.
If they can't manage to do that, the next best option is to concentrate on strengthening and maintaining non-Muslim numbers and Civil Society, whilst reading the Riot Act to the Mohammedans: NO further accommodation of sharia practices, NO madrasas, face-veils, child 'marriages' or polygamy, etc, NO foreign-funded mosques, and any attempts to push sharia and all calls for Jihad will result in expulsion from the country of the Muslims concerned and the demolition of the mosque from which such activities emanated. Strong protection given to all bona fide apostates and to Muslim girls who defect to marry non-Muslims; if a Muslim is found attacking, or trying to attack, or calling for attacks upon, apostates or critics of Islam or Christian evangelists or girls who have married non-Muslims, then that Muslim gets booted out into Somalia. Sentenced to Hell...
"news that trickles back discreetly through Barnabas Fund and other sources suggests that there is a steady flow of conversions to Christianity"
This has been enough for a Muslim cleric to raise the question of what to do about it. The figure he cited was millions converting from Islam to Christianity.
"they would end up with a *huge* Mohammedan Fifth Column within their new borders"
So true. This has been cited as the reason India really has no interest in going to war with Pakistan.