Islamist fighters calling themselves the “Battalion of Blood” launched a surprise attack on a heavily guarded natural gas plant in Eastern Algeria early this morning, capturing 41 hostages, all of them foreign nations, and many from Britain, France, and the US.
Officials are couching it as “terrorism” and promising a retaliatory response, but the group involved in the attack is making it no real secret that this operation is, in their eyes, an extension of the French invasion of Mali over the weekend, simply the transition of the already regional war into a fully global crisis.
Exactly how the attackers managed to overrun the facility so easily is unclear, as is the fate of the local workers, 150 or so are still reportedly also being held, though in a separate location from the foreigners and apparently in much less restrictive conditions.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta promised that the US would do whatever is necessary and proper to “deal with this situation,” but the comments from him and others suggest that isn’t going to include any serious effort to negotiate for the release of the hostages, and at best one might expect another unilateral raid, like the failed French raid in Somalia over the weekend that not only failed to free the hostage, but got one of the rescue team captured and eight civilians killed as well.
Instead, US and international reaction is liable to center around further escalation in Mali to spite the kidnappers, while cynically pressing Algeria for yet more concessions in enabling and potentially joining that war.
I am willing to bet 41 lives that this is a false-flag operation.
If I could ask Panetta one question it would be "Why didn't you fuckwits just mind your own business in the first place?"
Boy quagmires sure have become popular!
We asked for it, we got it.
And the "good" guys we are helping in Mali are led by the coup organizer, well known to US military, as he was trained here for a mission. How easy it is to play Rambo around the world. The problem is, every mess that was started turned out to be a long term sore. Today I looked at the ongoing UN SC report on Kosovo. We are still paying for peacekeepers in Kosovo, twelve years after it has been "liberated", and then "recognized" as "independent". While the tensions are worse. And after hundreds of thousands have fled homes. All that because there was a local conflict between the government and drugs traffickers that we chose to rename "freedom fighters". Before we interfered, there was no more then 2,000 dead on all sides in one year of conflict. After we came in, a country was bombed, poisoned with depleted uranium, thousands dead from bombs, hundreds of thousands of refugees that still did not come home. Now, we are all paying for UN mission UNMIK, NATO mission, KFOR, OSCE obsevatory mission, EU EULEX mission. Forever.
And all of this thanks to the damn western inclination to intervene where it shouldn't.
"Global" is a bit of an exaggeration but it occurs to be that Mali is providing a distraction from Syria. Syria is dangerous because it sits on Israel's borders and Israel being dragged into the fight could set off a wider Arab-Israeli war, with the US more or less forced to support Israel. Equally, the presence of Russian military personnel could lead to a, no doubt initially accidental, confrontation if foreign powers intervened. Mali offers the advantage of Syria (Muslim-bashing!) without the abovementioned disadvantages! Whether so convoluted a scheme was actually planned is, of course, another question.