WARRI, Nigeria — It takes two hours by boat to get to Deibu, an isolated outpost of about 17,000 people in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. The town is cut off from civilization by the River Nun and a thick mangrove forest, and first-time visitors who make the journey are struck by the poverty they find — a stretch of rickety mud houses, with canoes lying by the riverside. Deibu is trapped in another age. Children and adults bath naked in the Nun. There is no electricity service or plumbing. The village’s only sign of modernity is a battered health center, a [...]
If you had never looked at the Middle East, you might find it strange that a bank robbery spiraled into a raging battle between Lebanese government forces and a radical Islamic band of fighters based in a Palestinian refugee camp, leaving at least 100 dead and countless injured. The fighting, of course, has very little to do with the robbery that spawned the furious clashes. The battle between Fatah al-Islam and the Lebanese army offers a look at the deadly kaleidoscope of Middle Eastern conflicts, some of them local on the surface, but all deeply interrelated. Among the many pieces [...]
A week ago, when almost no media organization was paying close attention to the emerging disaster in the Gaza strip, we wrote about the ominous spiral of violence tearing through the Palestinian-controlled territory, as rival militias, gangs, religious extremists and common criminals turned the area into a free-for-all of terror. Since then, the Palestinian-on-Palestinian fighting has only intensified, creating a crisis that many veteran observers describe as the worst they have ever seen. Gazans, running for their lives from the street battles between armed factions, are now openly saying life was better under the hated Israeli occupation. Israel withdrew its [...]
