The Chicago Tribune notices the signs that a full-scale Inner Spiritual Struggle is breaking out in East Africa, as we have been telling you here for quite some time. “Fears of jihad in Horn of Africa: Somali Islamists put neighboring nations on edge,” by Laurie Goering in the Tribune:
JOHANNESBURG — Four months after Islamists seized the Somali capital of Mogadishu, promising a return to order and peace in war-ravaged Somalia, the Horn of Africa country and its neighbors sit at the brink of a new and potentially deadly conflict.
Somali Islamists, furious that Ethiopian troops have crossed the border to support Somalia’s Western-backed secular government, have called for jihad against Ethiopia, raising fears that Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, could suffer bombings or other guerrilla attacks.
Ethiopia, the region’s military powerhouse, accuses Islamist leaders of terrorist ties and remains determined to deny the movement control of Somalia. It helped Somalia’s weak government push the movement out of the southern town of Bur Haqaba, handing the Islamists their first military setback.
With Islamist troops just 60 miles from the government’s base in Baidoa, about a thousand Somali refugees a day are streaming over the border into Kenya, fearing new conflict, according to the United Nations.
`Low-intensity war’ possible
What’s ahead for Somalia is probably “chronic low-intensity war,” said Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert at Davidson College in North Carolina. That makes any promises by the Islamists to effectively rebuild the shattered nation hard to fulfill, he said….