News and Articles

24 Janauary 2012: Islamist militants have launched a suicide truck bomb attack on an Ethiopian military base in central Somalia, witnesses say.  Al-Shabab says it killed 10 Ethiopian soldiers in the attack in the town of Beledweyne but this has not been confirmed.  Ethiopian forces seized Beledweyne from al-Shabab last month.  Kenyan troops have also entered Somalia to battle the al-Qaeda linked group which still controls many areas.  Beledweyne is a strategic town, 30km (20 miles) from the Ethiopian border on the main road to the capital, Mogadishu, and also on the major artery linking the north and south of the country.  "There was a heavy explosion that shook the whole the city," local security official Mohamed Osman told the AFP news agency.

(24/01/2012):  France's Senate passed a bill Monday outlawing the denial of a genocide that has been recognised by French law, namely the Holocaust or the 1915-1916 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks. France and Turkey headed for a major diplomatic rift on Monday after French senators ignored threats from Ankara and approved a law outlawing the public denial of genocides. The draft law passed by the Senate makes it illegal for anyone to deny that the mass killing of ethnic Armenians at the hands of Ottaman Turks in 1915 amounted to genocide.  Under the law public denial would be punished by a year’s jail sentence and a €45,000 fine.

On Monday (16.01.2012) our forces killed 16 Ethiopian soldiers and wounded a dozen of them in a battle when the Ethiopian forces opened fire on our patrolling unit near the Arta-Ale Volcano in a place called Xoxom. It was in this battle that the 5  European nationals were killed. We regret the death of those innocent civilians.  Read More…