Holiday Roundup

As you may have noticed, I spent the holiday’s blog free. Therefore, I will now brief some of the main stories that I missed from both the media and blogs. In the likely case that I’ve missed something, please leave a comment. (note: I’m saving a separate post on Saddam Hussein’s hanging for later.)

MENA Blog Roundup (12/20/2006)

The bloggers at Foreign Policy’s passport highlight a different take on the recent elections in Iran.

Friday’s elections for Iran’s local councils and Assembly of Experts were widely reported as a “setback” for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And they were. But a more appropriate way to view them, says blogger Jonathan Edelstein, is as a crisis averted for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

As Edelstein, a lawyer in New York with a knack for analyzing Middle East politics, explains, Ahmadinejad’s faction was hoping to take control of the Assembly in order to install Ayatollah Mohammed Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi as the new Supreme Leader. With Yazdi in charge, Ahmadinejad would be free from the shackles Khamenei has placed on him in the realm of foreign policy.

The passport also points out this (via Bloomberg)

In the Tehran municipal election the president’s sister, Parvin Ahmadinejad, who is running on a list titled “the Pleasant Scent of Service,” ranks 11th from 15th candidates, state television said. She could fail to win a seat.

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Marc Lynch of Abu Aardvark looks at a new, post Baker-Hamilton study released by the International Crisis Group entitled “After Baker-Hamilton: What to do in Iraq“.

After the disappointing showing of the Iraq Study Group, the ICG makes for bracing reading – and offers a much more serious attempt to find some kind of solution. It eviscerates Washington fantasies in ways far deeper than Baker-Hamilton’s simple admission that things aren’t going well, by going straight to the heart of the political structures which have emerged from the American occupation.

Here’s more on the report.

The Fighting Begins in Somalia

A deadline imposed by Islamic forces under the command of the Union of Islamic Court (UIC) demanding the eviction of Ethiopian forces from Somali passed Tuesday. The “heavy fighting” was reported in and around the Transitional National Government (TNG) bases in Baidoa.

(BBC)

All Out War in the Horn of Africa Gets Closer

War will break out “any time now“, says Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf of the Transitional National Government (TNG). Players in the pending conflict are the Islamic forces of the Council of Islamic Courts against the TNG and ethopian forces (who are said to already be in Somalia). The US government is backing the TNG and Ethopia. Yosuf claimed “Al-Qaeda is opening up shop in Somalia” through the Council of Islamic Courts in a statement that coincides with a recent comment made by a US diplomat. The validity of this statement is questionable but I personally tend to agree.

Bill Roggio has much more on the possible relationship between Somali Islamists and al Qaeda…

MENA Blog Roundup (12/13/2006)

Marc Lynch (aka the aardvark): “I want to throw this out for discussion: in the not so distant future, we may be looking at the return of former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.”

Why? Lynch notes that Nouri al-Maliki has lost the confidence of the US and holds no parliamentary mandate. Abd al-Aziz Hakim (of SCIRI) is presented as the current replacement for Maliki here in the US but he is also a figure complacent in the current sectarian/civil war driving the Sunni-Shi’a divide. A Sunni sponsored nationalist alliance is in the works that proposes to unite “Salah Mutlaq, a key secular Sunni leader…” and his “Iraqi National Dialogue Front, Muqtadar Sadr’s organization, and the al-Wifaq movement headed by Allawi (who recently returned from London to Amman), in a ‘nationalist’ (wataniya) front.”

Why Allawi? He’s an ex-Baathist secular Shi’a with an existing record. And he’s more palatable to the West (and US) than anyone else mentioned above at this time and he is not an Iranian puppet.

Full disclosure: Commenter’s at Abu Aardvark rejected this idea soundly… Lynch points out Allawi’s work of late with the insurgency, pointing to recent reports:

Brushing aside the results of Iraq’s democratic elections, the insurgents proposed that an emergency government be formed under Allawi’s leadership. Non-sectarian politicians should be appointed to the crucial ministries of defence and the interior, they urged, because they would be responsible for rebuilding a strong national army and security service. Under this proposal, the newly elected Iraqi government would, in effect, have been sidelined.

We’ll have to see, for no one knows. My question is, why would an American voice pull any weight in a sovereign Iraq?

al Qaeda in Algeria

UPI: The recent attack on foreigners in Algeria signaled renewed activities of Muslim extremist groups believed to be linked to al-Qaida network.

The notorious Salafi Group for Daawa (call) and Fighting, one of Algeria’s armed groups resisting a peace pact for national reconciliation, Tuesday claimed responsibility for an attack two days ago on a bus carrying foreign employees of an American company in which two were killed and eight injured.
…
The attack, the first on foreigners in Algeria since the 1990s, occurred three months after al-Qaida’s second-in-command, Ayman Zawahiri, announced that the Salafi Group has joined the network, warning that the armed group will be “a thorn in the throats of the Crusaders and France’s agents in Algeria.”

The Religious Layout of the Greater Middle East

Mark I Levenstein writing at Foreign Policy‘s internal blog the Passport passes along a few pointers to incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Silvestre Reyes, who like most Americans has no idea about the MENA and it’s religious intricacies. Read the full link here, here are some of the more important details…