Word: somalia
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...That leaves the international community with two unappealing options. The short-term fix is to try to neutralize the pirates by pursuing them on land. Hence a U.S. draft proposal authorizing military action inside Somalia currently before the U.N. Security Council. But sending troops into Somalia is fraught with danger, as the American soldiers of Blackhawk Down, and now the Ethiopians, know to their cost. Present day U.S. operations against the Islamists - publicly confined to air strikes, but also including some clandestine fighting on the ground - have killed two significant leaders, including the bomb-maker in the 1998 al-Qaeda...
...Somalia has overtaken Nigeria as a piracy problem spot, as it claims the title of Ultimate Failed State. It is a haven for Islamic terrorists, currently poised to take Mogadishu and already expanding their operations to neighboring states (for example, killing more than 30 people with five car and suicide bombs at U.N. and foreign government buildings in the autonomous northern regions of Puntland and Somaliland); a departure point for hundreds of thousands of refugees (a refugee camp over the border in Kenya is now the biggest in the world); a center for human trafficking to the Middle East...
...these things are the consequences of non-existent government. All of them can only really be tackled properly when Somalia has a government that is both good and strong. As the French commander of his country's anti-piracy force in the Gulf, Vice-Admiral Gerard Valin, told Agence-France Presse in Bahrain: "We will not end this phenomenon unless we have a Somali government that has the means to act on its territory to fight piracy...
...dismissed in as many years. Not that the nominal government rules more than a few blocks of Mogadishu. Earlier this year, many of the other members of the Somali government and parliament gave up on their country and decamped to the Kenyan capital Nairobi. (See pictures of Somalia's pirates...
...that the fact that the two last forces to offer anything approaching a stabilizing presence in Somalia - the Ethiopian army and a small African Union peacekeeping force - are expected to withdraw in the next few weeks. (In the case of the Ethiopians, who invaded in late 2006 to topple an Islamist government and who have been accused of atrocities during their stay, whether they have been a force for or against stabilization is hotly debated...