By Elaine Donnelly
Extending sexual misconduct to combat units
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
U.N. peacekeeping has had its share of successes, but its failures are more memorable. Two have been memorialized in the movies: the Somali debacle in "Black Hawk Down" and the Rwandan genocide in "Hotel Rwanda." After these disasters, the United Nations concluded it had been too ambitious. Two recent decisions, however, could represent a reversal and should raise concerns in Washington and Turtle Bay.
Collusion between the shadowy northern Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is raising the specter that internationally linked Islamic terrorism may be reaching deeper into the heart of Africa than the Obama administration is willing to acknowledge.
Mali will need all the international support it can get to successfully conduct elections in July, the country's first since an international military intervention helped the West African nation beat back a takeover by Islamic extremists in the North, a Mali official said Monday.
Haidara Aissata, the only female Parliament member representing northern Mali, picked up the phone earlier this month to the anguished cries of a young mother who just learned her husband had sold the couple’s 9-year-old son to al Qaeda fighters for $40.
Libyan officials have confirmed that the late dictator Moammar Gadhafi's wife and three of his children have gone missing from their Algerian home, where they had taken refuge.
The State Department leveled an official "Foreign Terrorist Organization" designation on an Islamist group in the West African nation of Mali on Thursday, asserting that the group has strong ties to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Nigeria is miffed at U.S. criticism of its president after he pardoned a politician convicted of corruption and of the Nigerian army's response to terrorist attacks in the oil-rich West African nation.
A second al Qaeda commander has been slain by international forces hunting extremists in Mali, according to the military in neighboring Chad.
Republicans and Democrats are blaming one another for impending cuts to the defense budget brought about by sequestration. With serial annual deficits of $1 trillion-plus, however, and an aggregate debt nearing $17 trillion, the United States -- like an insolvent Rome and exhausted Great Britain of the past -- was bound to re-examine its expensive overseas commitments and strategic profile.
The al Qaeda commander known as the "Butcher of Timbuktu" has been killed by French forces in Mali, according to reports in the Algerian media.
The Obama administration and other Western governments ignored early warnings about small arms and explosives being smuggled out of Libya — weapons that now have fallen into the hands of al Qaeda-linked militants waging war across North Africa.
The State Department on Tuesday named an Islamic extremist leader in Mali as a "specially designated" international terrorist, a sign of deepening U.S. involvement in the war against al Qaeda and its allies in Africa.
This is a "first report" e-book that was obviously rushed to publication. The definitive book on the Benghazi debacle still needs to be written, and this isn't it. "Benghazi: The Definitive Report" has problems.
The radical Islamic fighters showed up at Mohamed Salia's Quranic school, armed with weapons and demanding to address his students.The leader, named Hamadi, entered one of the classrooms, took a piece of chalk and scrawled his message on the blackboard. "How to wage holy war," he wrote in Arabic.
