FRIDAY SURPRISES

 We live in a big world even though it seems smaller every year.  There is a lot going on - a lot for a person to keep track of.   Some things that happen seem so remote that we just put them out of our mind. Like this, maybe!

There is a country in Africa named Somalia.  Bad things have been happening there for a long time.  The country sits on the Indian Ocean coast of what we call the Horn of Africa.  All ocean shipping that comes through the Suez Canal into and out of the Red Sea passes by it.  

Pirates work out of Somalia seeking ransom from unarmed vessels passing by.  You may remember Tom Hanks playing the captain of one of those ships in a movie called "Captain Phillips".  

The capital of the country is Mogadishu.  You may remember a harrowing incident recounted in the Movie "Black Hawk Down" in which American soldiers were ambushed and murdered by Somali insurgents.  Same place.

With that as background, know that there has been fighting going on there for a long time.  A group called al-Shabaab is trying to wrest the country away from the elected government.   President Trump had ordered all of our troops out of Somalia near the end of his term. Well, just the other day, I saw that President Biden had redeployed 500 US troops there to support that government.  Here, we are actually putting boots on the ground unlike the assistance we are giving Ukraine.  Not only are we supplying soldiers, but we are making armed airstrikes against these insurgents.  In late September, we made an airstrike in which we killed 27 members of al-Shabaab.  On October 3, it was reported that with another airstrike, we killed Abdullahi Nadir, a high ranking al-Shabaab leader.  

This al-Shabaab is part of the al Qaeda network.  We have been chasing al Qaeda around the Middle East ever since 9/11/01 - twenty-one years.  It seems it is a never-ending task.  I just wish we weren't so proud of killing people.