Your Hue

fhs-short-prep:

But four years later and nearly 10,000 soldiers strong, the African Union force in Somalia has hardened into a war-fighting machine — and it seems to be winning the war. Analysts say the African Union has done a better job of pacifying Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital and a hornet’s nest of Islamist militants, clan warlords, factional armies and countless glassy-eyed freelance gunmen, than any other outside force, including 25,000 American troops in the 1990s.

Their surprising success has put the African Union in the driver’s seat of an intensifying international effort to wipe out Somalia’s Shabab militants, once and for all. Kenya, Ethiopia, the United States, France, Djibouti, Burundi and Uganda have all jumped in to some degree against the Shabab, a brutal and wily insurgent group that is considered both a regional menace and an international threat, with possible sleeper cells embedded in Somali communities in the United States and Europe.

The Shabab have been terrorizing Somalia for years, imposing a harsh and alien form of Islam, chopping off heads and unleashing suicide bombers, including Somali-Americans recruited from Minnesota. But the African Union has dealt the Shabab a crippling blow in Mogadishu, which is what may have encouraged Kenyan and Ethiopian forces to recently invade separate parts of Somalia in an unusual regional effort to spread the Shabab thin on several fronts and methodically eliminate them.

fyeahafrica:

The African Union has denied that 70 bodies displayed by Somalia’s militant Islamist group al-Shabab were those of its troops killed in fighting.

Al-Shabab showed the bodies to journalists, claiming they were Burundian soldiers killed in Mogadishu on Thursday.

An AU spokesman dismissed the claim as propaganda and said 10 of its soldiers had been killed and two were missing.

The AU has 9,000 troops in Somalia to back the weak interim government.

Meanwhile, two doctors in neighbouring Kenya have been charged with membership of al-Shabab, a banned organisation.

Kenyan nationals Ali Omar Salim and Adan Hassan Hillow pleaded not guilty during a court appearance in the capital, Nairobi, on Friday.

They were arrested by anti-terrorism police on Wednesday, amid growing concern in Kenyan government circles that al-Shabab has built a strong presence in the country.

Kenya has sent troops into Somalia, prompting al-Shabab to threaten reprisals.

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Native people are connected to history, to family, to land, culture and community. We are still alive. We are still here; we have not disappeared into the past, like the pilgrims did. All of the Elders I know tell me Native People have been giving thanks for as long as people have existed. After the corn was all dried, pumpkins sliced and the wild plums brought in it was a time for “giving thanks.” When the food was together for the hard winter months and when the work was all done, they gathered.