By lex, on January 8th, 2007
So, you’re a member of al Qaeda and allied to the Somalian Islamic Courts Union and life is pretty good – you’ve got the AK’s, you’ve got the will to use them and everybody trembles when you walk by. You’re all ready to drag these poor benighted Africans back to the 7th century, where guys like you get to decide on a whim who lives and who dies, and best of all you can blame it all on God’s will, because he’s on your side.
But then the Ethiopian infidels you’ve been threatening with jihad get tired of that schtick, or else take you at your word and intervene on the behalf of your enemies, the UN-recognized national government. It turns out that maybe God is not on your side, or if he is, he’s got a strange way of showing it as your battle lines collapse in the face of an actual army, and that army drives you out of the Somalian capital, a place you’d just gotten used to ruling through intimidation and terror. They drive you south like stampeding cattle back to your former base of operations in Kismayo, and eventually out of that place too. You end up stuck in a remote corner of the country, hemmed in by your foes to the north and east who are pressing you hard with armor, infantry and air, prevented from crossing the Kenyan border to your west, the sea at your back and no haven there since it’s patrolled ** by lean and hungry greyhounds who’d like nothing more than to welcome you aboard.
Well, they might actually prefer you making a fight of it, but never mind.
As if all of that was’t bad enough and just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, just when you’d run from your last warren to your final bolt hole, an AC-130 Spectre gunship, of all things, shows up overhead. What do you do?
That’s what you do.
A U.S. Air Force gunship has conducted a strike against suspected members of al Qaeda in Somalia, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports exclusively.
The targets included the senior al Qaeda leader in East Africa and an al Qaeda operative wanted for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa, Martin reports. Those terror attacks killed more than 200 people.
It turns out it’s not the 7th century after all, it’s the 21st and there’s nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide.
Sucks to be you.
BBC Graphic
Oh yeah, and you. ** Sucks to be you too.
** 07-19-2018 Original link gone; replacement found – Ed.
The Lexicans 