US says it seized Iranian weapons bound for Houthis in Yemen

The United States says it has hit more Houthi military targets inside Yemen, after seizing Iranian weapons intended for the rebels. US navy Seals raided a vessel near the coast of Somalia last week.

Somalia’s first women’s football team, the Golden Girls

 

Courage, corruption, culture and competition – all major factors in the life and times of the first women’s football team in Somalia and its inspirational young coach, Shaima Sellal. The government gave the go-ahead for a women’s team in 1994, but it did not take off because of the continuing civil war. Football can be a casualty of the conflict in a “failed state”.

How Can Pirates Exist in the 21st Century? | History of Somali Pirates

 

One of the more interesting historical phenomena to be revived in the early 2000s is certainly the resurgence of piracy off the coast of Somalia

What is next for Somalia’s political crisis?

 

A dispute about delayed elections led to gunfire in Mogadishu on Friday.

Somalia was scheduled to hold an election in February but the presidential vote was missed after the government failed to agree with regional leaders on how the poll should be held.

The dispute about the delay is fuelling divisions and worsening clan-based grievances.

Now, there is anger and confusion as to whether the president should remain in office after his term expired on February 8.

Who is in charge in Somalia?

 

Somalia is facing a power vacuum as President Farmaajo’s term ends without agreement on holding elections.

Somalia’s presidential elections were supposed to take place before President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo’s four-year term expired on Monday.

But he is in dispute with regional leaders over how to hold the vote.

The Mothers of Rinkeby: Last Night in Sweden

A group of Somali super mums patrols the streets of Stockholm's infamous Rinkeby neighbourhood to prevent crime.

It's 7pm and Ardo is getting ready for her shift. She puts on her orange jacket and makes her way through Rinkeby town centre, passing under its famous Rinkeby Centrum arch.

It's bustling on a Friday evening with elderly men sitting on benches, chatting and watching passersby, young people making their way to and from the nearby gym and families heading out to eat in the Pakistani restaurant or pizzeria.

Warriors from the North (video)

The chilling and courageous account of a Danish-Somalian boy in Copenhagen who fell victim to al-Shabab recruiters.

His back turned to the camera as he looks out over a nondescript housing development in Copenhagen, "The Shadow" describes how he fell victim to recruiters from the armed Somali group al-Shabab.

He outlines the conditions that make boys such as him susceptible to the lure of the "holy war", explaining that "nothing in my life made any sense." So eloquent is he in his account that one might think it was scripted, but what happened to him is as real as the scenes from a suicide attack by one of his former friends.

A Somali in America

The story of Ali, a young Somali refugee in the US, who's now re-assessing his new life under the Trump presidency.

"A Somali in America" documents the experience of Ali Warsame, a Somali refugee who gained residency in the United States in 2016, but is re-assessing his new life now that Donald Trump is president.

While in a detention camp in Ukraine, Ali was told he'd be moving to the US through the United Nations refugee resettlement programme. Ali remembers getting the official notification on Eid Day in 2013: "In my life, I never thought that I will be in the USA," he says, because many others before him had been rejected.

Why does Somalia matter?

Somalia hopes to restore stability by electing a new president.

It was an unusual presidential election, with 22 candidates and no polling stations. MPs voted but not everyone else because of the threat of attack.

The election was marred by accusations of bribery and political infighting among the clans of Somalia, all 135 of them.

So will the new president be able to lead Somalis through the many political and security challenges?

Crisis in the Horn of Africa: Somalia's Famine

REWIND revisits a Fault Lines probe into Somalia's disastrous 2011 famine and the role of US counterterrorism.

In 2011, the worst drought in 60 years threw some 13 million people across the Horn of Africa into crisis. In Somalia, ravaged by two decades of conflict, the consequences were disastrous. Hundreds of thousands starved to death, many of them children.

In the midst of this human catastrophe Fault Lines travelled to Mogadishu to meet refugees who had fled to the most war-ravaged city in the world to escape an even worse fate, and the aid and medical workers struggling to help them.

Somalia: The Forgotten Story (Video)

The story of Somalia's decline from stability to chaos and the problems facing its people at home and abroad.

Somalia's modern history is a tale of independence, prosperity and democracy in the 1960s, military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s - followed by a desperate decline into civil war and chaos almost ever since.

The effect of the war has been to scatter the Somali people in their millions to refugee camps and  neighbouring countries - and in their hundreds of thousands to the UK, Canada and the United States.

Somalia gained independence from Britain, France and Italy in 1960. It held free and fair elections and was ruled democratically from 1960 to 1969.

Nearly 90 Percent Of People Killed In Recent Drone Strikes Were Not The Target

U.S. drone strikes have killed scores of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

According to a new report from The Intercept, nearly 90 percent of people killed in recent drone strikes in Afghanistan "were not the intended targets" of the attacks.

Documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse. 

The report, compiled from classified documents released by a source in the intelligence community, corroborates the many news accounts of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes. U.S. drone strikes have killed scores of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2009.

In December 2013, a drone strike in Yemen killed 14 people returning from a wedding. Government officials mistook their vehicles for those of al Qaeda militants. Parents in Pakistan have reported taking their children out of school to protect them from possible strikes.

The Drone Papers 

Can be read here at The Intercept

Sixteen-Year-Old Malala Yousafzai Warns Obama: ‘Drone Attacks Are Fueling Terrorism’

The White House invited sixteen-year-old Pakistani women’s rights activist Malala Yousafzai to meet the President, First Lady, and their daughter Malia on Friday. The youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize contender made the most of the photo opportunity, warning Obama that U.S. drone strikes were fueling terrorist attacks.

“I thanked President Obama for the United States’ work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees,” she said in the statement. “I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact.”

The official White House statement about the meeting did not mention this comment, instead declaring that the U.S. “joins with the Pakistani people and so many around the world to celebrate Malala’s courage and her determination to promote the right of all girls to attend school and realize their dreams.”

Drone dialogue: Flying in circles?

Transparency and accountability remain out of sight after four major reports question the legality of US drone strikes.

Mamana Bibi was tending her crops in northern Pakistan one day in late October 2012. The 68-year-old grandmother was picking okra not far from the family home, when a missile was fired from a remotely piloted aircraft. Bibi was killed instantly, her body torn to pieces just metres away from her young granddaughter, according to a recent report published by Amnesty International.

Four recent major reports have questioned the legality of the United States' drone programme, which has struck targets in several countries, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia - but it remains unclear how the US will respond to the concerns.

But the reports - two by UN Special Rapporteurs and two by human rights groups - say some of the drone strikes constituted unjustifiable attacks on civilians. So far, the US government has released no official number of civilian casualties from its drone programme. The UN, however, has recorded at least 450 civilians killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan since 2004. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has estimated almost double that figure were killed.

The US denies that it indiscriminately targets civilians and defends the drone strikes, saying they are "necessary, legal and just". Yet some legislators have called on the Obama administration to abide by the recommendations put forth in the reports.

While the U.S. denies targeting civilians isn't it interesting that people have been killed by drones while attending weddings and funerals and that the press will report verbatim that all those who have died in these drone attacks are "militants" yet there is no way to verify that claim.  You must rely upon the press briefings given by officials  speaking for the American  government.

Somalia's war on journalism

Exploring the media landscape in a country where going to work has become a life-and-death decision for reporters.    2012 has been a big year for Somali media – after years of covering civil war, rising insurgency and a battle for resources, Somali journalists reported on the country’s first election in decades. But there is another reason 2012 has been significant: 13 journalists have been killed in the country this year. A suicide bomb attack in Mogadishu on September 20 killed three reporters. Hours later, unidentified gunmen shot dead veteran journalist Hassan Yusuf Absuge for covering the explosion. Al-Shabaab, the armed group operating in Somalia, has claimed responsibility for a number of the killings this year, but they are by no means the only threat. There are no official regulations on what you can or cannot report but journalists trying to cover stories that criticise Al-Shabab, government, big business or certain clans and their leaders, do so at their peril.