Despite flat oil exports and a struggling economy, Iraq has embarked on a comprehensive program to re-arm its embattled security forces. The country is buying American patrol planes, Italian naval vessels, Russian helicopters and armored vehicles co-produced by American and British firms. The new equipment is utilitarian stuff — optimized for patrols in and over Iraq’s teeming cities and on its smuggler-infested waters rather than for attacks on external foes — and reflects the complete inward focus of Iraq’s military. But the purchases do little to solve the forces’ nearly complete lack of logistics capability. In early January, working through [...]
African leaders made plain their disappointment and concern over Sudan’s handling of the conflict in its western Darfur region by rejecting the central African country’s bid to lead the African Union during an annual summit this week that also saw a first effort at African mediation by new U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Prosperous and stable Ghana instead assumed the mantle of the 53-member pan-African grouping at the meeting in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, amid warnings from Sudanese rebels that they would attack an under-equipped AU peacekeeping force operating in Darfur should Sudan be tapped to succeed the Congo [...]
A fierce ideological battle that appears to favor a radical Islamic constituency may hold the key to the future of a little-known but restive region in south Russia. The religious topography of the North Caucasus can no longer be reduced to a simple theological contest between Sufi traditionalists and Islamists. Increasingly, ideological schisms are emerging within the Islamist constituency itself, which Moscow rather ambiguously labels the “Wahhabi” community. The infighting revolves around differences in thinking between moderate reformers and radicals, a rivalry that, while long-prevalent in nearby Chechnya, has now become especially apparent in the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, another patch [...]
