By Julian Cardona

Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican town on the U.S. border where daylight murders and beheaded bodies have become the norm, could be the world’s most violent city.

With 130 murders for every 100,000 residents per year on average last year, the city of 1.6 million people is more violent than the Venezuelan capital Caracas, the U.S. city of New Orleans and Colombia’s Medellin. That is according to a study by the Mexican non-profit Citizen Council for Public Security and Justice, which presented its report to Mexico’s security minister at a conference this week.

The fight between rival drug cartels over Ciudad Juarez’s local drug market and smuggling routes into the United States broke out at the start of last year and continues to intensify.

Reliable global crime statistics are hard to pin down and a study last year by Foreign Policy Magazine placed Caracas as the world’s top murder capital, also with 130 murders per 100,000 residents. (The Mexican study disputes that and puts the Caracas figure at 96).

But Ciudad Juarez’s rising murder rate, currently at about 250 per month, appears to put it well ahead of other notorious world crime capitals such as South Africa’s Cape Town, Moscow, Baghdad, and Papua New Guinea’s capital Port Moresby, according to the Mexican and Foreign Policy studies.

In fact, in Ciudad Juarez during the first day of the conference where the Mexican study was presented, eight people were murdered in the city’s streets, including a prosecutor, a lawyer, two policewomen, a clown performer and a gardener.

Ciudad Juarez, a manufacturing city across from El Paso, Texas, already has a stained history with the unsolved murders of hundreds of young women in the 1990s.

Perhaps most worryingly is not that 10,000 troops and elite police stationed there have failed to stop the drug violence, but that local officials say they have everything under control.

Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz says the city’s fight against drug violence is “a successful process that the world can learn from.” Chihuahua state Governor Jose Reyes Baez, who has long bemoaned the media focus on drug violence in Ciudad Juarez, says that troops can gradually leave as newly-trained police take over. The army denies any scaling back in its deployment.

Gunmen shot and killed U.S. Border Patrol agent Robert Rosas in California near the U.S.-Mexico border fence on July 23, the first such fatal shooting in more than a decade. In rugged desert where people smugglers and drug traffickers roam, Rosas was tracking a suspicious group of people near the rural town of Campo, about 60 miles (97 kms) east of San Diego.

After radioing for backup, he got out of his vehicle and started to follow members of the group as it split up. He was attacked, robbed of his weapon and shot several times in the head and abdomen.

Mexican police have rounded up five suspects believed to be coyotes, or people smugglers, and drug gang members, although the FBI, which is heading the investigation, considers the case unsolved.

While it unfolds, the probe into the murder of 30 year-old Rosas, father of two small children and whose memorial service is on Friday, is a test for U.S.-Mexican cooperation. Both countries are at pains to show a unified alliance in the drug war, underscored again by U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske’s visit to Mexico this week.

But Rosas’ murder is also a warning that Mexican organized crime is increasingly undaunted by U.S. law enforcement. In Mexico, well-armed drug cartels take on the army at will. Mexico’s escalating drug war has killed some 12,800 people since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched his army-backed crackdown on cartels.

Attacks are also rising against the Border Patrol on the U.S.-Mexico border as drug gangs, pressured by increased enforcement and the border fence, link up with people smugglers to use illegal immigrants to smuggle narcotics across the border.

Border Patrol agents often work alone in remote stretches of the 2,000-mile (3,200-km) border and traffickers are willing to use brutal violence against them if threatened. Last year, Border Patrol agent Luis Aguilar was intentionally run over and killed by a smuggler in a drug-packed Hummer in Arizona.

According to U.S. security consultancy Stratfor: “such deaths in the United States can be considered almost inevitable, especially considering that authorities report nearly 50 Border Patrol agents were fired on during 2008.”  In Tucson sector alone in the first 10 months of fiscal 2009 there have been 171 assaults on Border Patrol agents.

Disarming Mexican drug cartels, who have easy access to assault weapons in gun shops in U.S. border states, is one of the central strategies of the drug war but one that is making limited progress.

- Luke Baker is a political and general news correspondent at Reuters. -

The mountains and deserts of southern Afghanistan are far removed from the elegant charms of Trieste in northern Italy, but there will be a link between the two this weekend.

Foreign ministers from the Group of Eight nations meet in the Italian city on the Adriatic on Thursday for three days of talks, with the state of play in Afghanistan, as well as developments in Iran and the Middle East, front and centre of their agenda.

Nearly eight years and tens of billions of dollars on from the U.S.-led invasion that overthrew the Taliban, the United States and its allies appear no closer to bringing long-term stability to the country, with the Taliban resurgent throughout the south and west and the instability expanding across the border into Pakistan.

One of the major areas of unrest is Helmand, a vast desert and mountain province in the far south where around 8,000 British troops have been deployed for 3-1/2 years and 10,000 U.S. Marines are steadily being sent in as reinforcements.

While 18,000 troops backed by helicopters, jets, Predator drones, armoured vehicles and endless advanced weaponry may sound like more than enough of a match for bands of bearded militants who usually aren't armed with much more than a Kalashnikov rifle, it's not always the case.

Helmand, split down the middle by the Helmand river, is larger than Switzerland and has a daunting mix of terrain that the Taliban and their followers are far more familiar with than foreign troops sweating in heavy, cumbersome combat gear. And it's not just the challenges of the topography, it's the sheer size of the area that stretches any army's capability.

When I was in Helmand late last year, British troops at a Forward Operating Base in the far north of the province told me that they didn't have enough troops or back-up to venture any further than three kilometres from their small fortified camp to take on the enemy.

"The Taliban know it. If we attack them, they go just over three kilometres away and we have to come back to base," an officer at the remote outpost told me.

The absurdity of that situation partly explains why Britain and the United States have acknowledged that Helmand is currently in a "stalemate", a position they hope will be broken with a new strategy and the increase in troops in the coming months.

But the deadlock in fighting and the need for more manpower-- there are 90,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, 50 percent less than in now relatively more stable  Iraq -- is not the only concern on the agenda for the G8 foreign ministers.

As well as trying to agree amongst themselves how they can best support the U.S.- and NATO-driven effort, they need to assess the implications of non-cooperation from Iran, on Afghanistan's western border, and the widening instability in the Pakistan tribal areas on Afghanistan's eastern border. Iran was due to send a delegation to the G8 meeting, but in the wake of international condemnation of the fallout from its disputed presidential election, it has cancelled its participation.

Afghanistan's election in August, when President Hamid Karzai will seek reelection despite broad unpopularity in the country and among some of his Western backers, will also be a focus of discussion. Karzai's high-profile makes him stand out among the 41candidates registered for the Aug. 20 poll. That greater degree of visibility is likely to secure him enough votes for reelection, according to some opinion polls, even if many Afghans express frustration at the scare progress made during his past 5 years in power.

Politically, socially and militarily, Afghanistan remains hugely in flux nearly eight years on from the Taliban's overthrow. While army commanders admit there can be no military solution to the conflict, diplomats and development experts are struggling to find a political way forward either.

Three days of talks among eight foreign ministers in Trieste is unlikely to go very far in resolving what is becoming an ever more intractable conflict 5,000 kilometres away.

By Dean Yates

(The author lived in Indonesia from 1992-1995 and 2000-2005, with various assignments in between)

It was not that long ago that Indonesia was lurching from crisis to crisis, even drawing some (misplaced) predictions it could go the way of the former Yugoslavia and break apart. These days it rarely makes the front page. It has a steady president in Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, probably the freest press in Southeast Asia and political violence appears to be a thing of the past. The last major bomb attack blamed on Islamic militants was in 2005.

It’s worth recalling how bad things were in Indonesia as this country of 226 million people prepares to vote in parliamentary elections on Thursday, which will set the stage for the more important presidential poll in July. The parliamentary election will be the third time voters in the world’s most populous Muslim nation have elected their representatives at a national level since the downfall of former autocrat Suharto in 1998. As the Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial on April 8, Indonesia
shows that democracy and Islam aren’t mutually exclusive.

All this progress seemed so unlikely early in 1998 when the country’s economy was in freefall. It’s hard to imagine a currency losing 85 percent of its value, but that’s what happened to the rupiah when the Asian financial crisis savaged Indonesia. I remember stunned Indonesian colleagues in the Reuters Jakarta bureau, their hands on their head, as the rupiah crashed to a low of 17,000 to the U.S. dollar. Months before, one U.S. dollar bought 2,500 rupiah. Food prices soared and the “wong cilik”, or little people, rebelled. Food riots hit markets. Protests escalated. Students demanded democratic change. Then Suharto — under pressure from the International Monetary Fund — hiked fuel prices on May 4, 1998. A week later, violence exploded, killing 1,200 people in Jakarta. Suharto was forced out a few days later.   

After three decades of authoritarian rule that combined rapid economic growth with political repression and breathtaking corruption, Suharto’s “New Order” government had collapsed. It was replaced by a vacuum. Communal animosity that had simmered for years in the eastern Moluccas, an idyllic group of islands evenly split between Muslims and Christians, erupted. Thousands
were killed. President Abdurrahman Wahid, an affable moderate Muslim cleric with a penchant for cracking jokes, was toppled in 2001 in an impeachment vote, effectively for incompetence.

International perceptions of Indonesia, already pretty grim, got worse in 2002 when Islamic militants bombed two nightclubs in Bali, killing 202 people, mostly foreign tourists. As I stepped over debris the following morning, bits of flesh still under twisted metal, all I could think of was why? Why Bali? Why this beautiful island? The answer was obvious of course — kill holidaymakers enjoying themselves on one of the world’s most famous islands and you will get the world’s attention.

And then came the Asian tsunami. A massive undersea earthquake of 9.15 magnitude unleashed giant waves that smashed into the Indonesian province of Aceh in December 2004, killing around 170,000 people. The toll was unbelievable. Bodies lay rotting for weeks. I still remember Adnan Ibrahim, who had spent days searching refugee camps in the local capital Banda Aceh for his son, Syawaluddin, 17. “The boy is very smart. He is good with computers,” said Ibrahim, before breaking into sobs. I am sure he never found him.

Beside elections of that year — which brought Yudhoyono to power — the tsunami was a turning point for Indonesia. In the early days after the disaster, Yudhoyono decided to allow foreign militaries and aid workers to descend on Aceh to help with rescue and recovery efforts. He had opened the door to a province that until then was virtually sealed off to foreigners, scene of a vicious conflict between the Indonesian military and separatist rebels that had killed 15,000 people over the past 30 years. The tsunami was a catalyst for a peace deal between the government and the rebels in 2005. It confounded sceptics who predicted it would never last. Former rebels will even run for local office in the elections on Thursday.

Few thought Indonesia would make such strides and be where it is today. Democracy is well entrenched — “taken root and flourished” — in the words of the Economist in its April 2 edition. Sure there are problems. It’s a huge, unwieldy place to govern. Corruption is still a major problem and the country’s infrastructure needs an overhaul. And it is still poor. But compared to a little over 10 years ago, Indonesia has done pretty well. It has a huge civil society. Think of any issue and there will be an NGO in there fighting for justice and accountability. Indonesians are a people of great warmth, humour and openness. They deserve the international praise that now comes their way.

Emmanuel Braun was named as Reuters Video Journalist of the Year this month for his coverage of Africa.

The call takes me by surprise. It is our contact at the CNDP, the rebel movement in eastern Congo, telling us its leader Laurent Nkunda has agreed to meet us in his stronghold in the Masisi Mountains.

It would normally be a three-hour drive from our base in Goma to the region. But the government has banned journalists from using the main road to its enemy so we are forced to take muddy mountain paths. What follows is a 27-hour ordeal by car, motorbike and foot.

Our problems start as we approach the Rutshuru mountain area, a beautiful volcanic landscape. Our heavy 4×4 car is designed for deserts and is sliding toward the chasm below us. We get out and push it out of the mud. Night is falling. Some CNDP political advisors show up but are vague on how far we are from Nkunda’s headquarters. ”Twenty minutes,” says one of them. Pushed, he ups his estimate to 15 hours, maybe.

We decide to spend the night in the next village, Tongo, which is now in rebel hands. A young fighter stands with his RPG balancing on his shoulder as wide-eyed, laughing children scatter around us. In this remote place, white people are rarely seen. Villagers organize us a room and we go to bed exhausted at 6 pm.

We wake up with the first light to find a group of villagers gathered around two women sitting outside a hut. Behind the women are a dozen big shell canisters. “Look at what the government is sending us!,” says one of the women. “They are killing us. We are happy with the CNDP, they protect us …”’

A nice quote and visual, but the scene has clearly been organized by the CNDP. This is where getting to the truth of a situation becomes kind of an art. Guns in between witnesses and journalists can distort the most simple tale. But propaganda is easily detectable in every conflict and we are used to dealing with it.

The car has died. Before we understand what is going on, several barefoot young men have loaded themselves up with our luggage and equipment and hit the path at a remarkable speed. Progress is slow and exhausting. After a few hours of this treatment, I cannot count the mountains anymore. When my colleague Sarah stops at a big puddle, a young CNDP officer who’s escorting us barks an order in Swahili. A rangy soldier picks up Sarah, hurls her on his shoulder and crosses the puddle in his Rwandan army plastic boots.

After a six-hour trek, we reach a place at the edge of a tropical rainforest where a group of young men and rebel soldiers are waiting for us. We are delighted to see their Chinese-made motorbikes, but there are only three bikes for them and the six people in our party. The bikes are loaded with our equipment and we squeeze on three to a bike. We are so happy not to be walking anymore and at first the journey is a fabulous adventure. The drivers are amazing but we fall as the bike gets stuck in the mud. My buttocks are almost numb with pain. Then it starts raining. We stop at some nearby huts but the drivers insist on pushing on. The rain won’t stop soon and we are expected at the CNDP headquarters before nightfall. It’s impossible to open my eyes as I hold tight to Sarah, who is sitting in front of me on the bike.

Two hours later and 27 hours after we left Goma we finally reach the CNDP headquarter fence. We are standing in semidarkness, frozen and ready to kill for a piece of stale bread. A guard tells us the boss is out and we must wait.

It is another hour before we enter the headquarters, a brick room with only a table and a few chairs for furniture. A lit fireplace warms the room. A man brings a big jar full of fresh milk and several round yellow cheeses. I have to stop myself from rushing at the food like a starving dog. It is delicious.

Our first meeting with Nkunda takes place in this room with the fire and a weak bulb the only light. A tall man in a beige battledress appears suddenly out of the dark, a stick with a golden eagle head knob in his hand. He is followed by his wife, who is also wearing a battledress. I barely saw him when he entered the room and I know I won’t film him today.

He seems satisfied to see us and strikes up a conversation right away.  When asked how he felt about living in hiding, he starts to compare himself to General De Gaulle in his English exile during World War Two. I relay the quotes to my colleagues in Dakar.

We meet again in the morning for a proper interview and pictures.  In total, I have just four hours to make the most of this encounter, a difficult exercise when your brain and body are just begging for a break.  A UN armoured car takes us back to Goma.  As I write this four months later, Nkunda has been betrayed by his friends and ousted from Congo. He’s probably sitting in Kigali considering his plans.

Congolese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda attends a rally in Rutshuru, north of Goma in eastern Congo, November 22, 2008.  REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

More Reuters coverage:
Rwandan troops leave Congo, stoking reprisal fears
Democratic Republic of Congo rebel leader arrested (video)
SCENARIOS: Nkunda arrest boosts risky Congo peace plan
FACTBOX: Conflict in eastern Congo

I first met Raed al-Athamna when he was driving a journalist friend of mine around Gaza in his yellow, stretch-Mercedes taxi during the tense and violent days after Gaza militants captured Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli soldier, in the summer of 2006.

Raed seemed to be a good ‘fixer’ - attentive, sensible and with far-from-perfect but perfectly understandable English.

A few months later, I interviewed him in the rubble of Beit Hanoun - after Israeli tank shells slammed in to a relative’s home killing 18 members of his extended family early one morning as most were still sleeping.

Israel said a technical mishap caused the shells to stray from their intended targets and in to the residential neighbourhood where the Athamnas lived.

Perhaps because his immediate family had escaped the tragedy in their nearby home, and perhaps because loss is so intimately entwined in the lives of Gazans, Raed seemed sanguine and calm in the interview and still confident that peace between Israelis and Palestinians was possible.

Raed’s business hit a lean patch soon after that interview - when many of the foreign journalists he worked with stopped making the trip in to Gaza as the menace of kidnapping and the unpredictability of the factional fighting between Fatah and Hamas effectively put the Strip off limits.

Despite the dip in business Raed decided it was time to leave Beit Hanoun - whose location near the Israeli border in the northeast corner of Gaza made it a favourite for rocket launchers and thus a regular scene of clashes and airstrikes - so he took his life’s savings, some $70,000, and got to work on a new home.

In the village of Abed Rabbo - a few kilometres south of Beit Hanoun on a plot next to his father’s house - Raed thought he had found refuge from the constant violence.

But he was wrong.

When I interviewed Raed earlier this week next to more rubble, this time the rubble of his own home, he was anything but sanguine, calm and confident that peace would come soon.

He was furious, distraught and very, very scared of what the future held for him and his family.

With his savings spent on a house in rubble, and little hope of seeing it rebuilt soon, and with his taxi lying mangled in a nearby bush it was not hard to understand the rage and confusion.

He said he has already given up on his children’s education.

“How to send them to school? How? My daughter was the first in her class and first for all of north Gaza. But I have told her forget it - she cannot be a doctor now.”

He reached in to his pocket and pulled out a single key on a simple key-ring.

“This is all what we have now, this is all I can give her - our house over there,” he said, waving the key angrily and pointing east in to Israel, towards another home his family had to leave more than 60 years ago, as conflict erupted when the state of Israel was created in 1948.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Jerry Lampen

Israel’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza has made headlines around the world.

But beyond the raw realities of war — more than 1,100 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead — the three-week conflict has also created a peculiar intersection with music, literature and cinema, in the surreal way that wars sometimes do.

The latest away-from-the-headlines development is that Israel’s entry for the Eurovision song contest, the annual pan-European song-fest that pits some 40 nations against one another, is suddenly under pressure because of the war.

Israel, which has won the competition before and takes it very seriously, is hoping to enter a singing duo — Mira Awad, a Christian Arab Israeli, and Achinoam Nini, better known as Noa, a Jewish Israeli of Yemenite descent — for the event to be held in Moscow in May.

But some Arab and Jewish artists and intellectuals are calling on Awad to pull out of the competition, saying her participation would play into the “Israeli propaganda machine” that seeks to convey an image of national coexistence — Jews and Arabs living happily under one banner.

“What allows the international community to provide support is Israel’s image as a ‘democratic’, ‘enlightened’, ‘peace-seeking’ country,” a string of signatories wrote in an open letter to Awad, posted on the website of ynetnews.com.

“Your participation in Eurovision is taking part in the activity of the Israel propaganda machine,” they said, with one describing Awad’s role as that of a “fig leaf” for Israel.

Neither Awad nor Nini has commented on the letter but Israel’s broadcasting authority defended their participation, saying it “expresses the aspiration for coexistence which transcends politics.”

Another quirky overlap between the current conflict and art has been created by the successful Israeli film “Waltz with Bashir”, an animated documentary that examines the futility of Israel’s war in Lebanon in the early 1980s.

The film, which takes a critical look at the role Israel played during the massacre of Palestinians by Christian militias in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982, won a Golden Globe last week and is tipped for best foreign film at the Oscars.

Playing on those hopes, a cartoon in Haaretz newspaper on Thursday depicted a group of Israeli soldiers hanging around a tank outside Gaza as the city burns behind them. One of the soldiers says to the others: “I have an idea for a movie that could win an Oscar.”

The 24/7 coverage of the war in the Israeli media has also given publishing houses a good reason to crank up their war-book promotions.

Gefen, an Israeli publisher, took out advertisements in the Israeli press this week to tout new and re-issued titles including: “Shackled Warrior”, “Mossad Exodus”, and “The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu”, the military commander brother of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is tipped to win Israel’s next election on Feb. 10th.

It may not be art imitating life, but it is certainly life re-lived through pop culture.

Who remembers the Google Wars website that was doing the viral rounds a few years back – a mildly amusing, non-scientific snapshot of the search-driven, internet world we live in?

It lives on at www.googlebattle.com where you can enter two search terms, say ‘Lennon vs. McCartney’ or ‘Left vs. Right’, and let the internet pick a winner by the number of search hits each word gets.

As we reported here – the virtual world has become a real battleground in the ongoing Gaza conflict – with all sides deploying significant resources.

For Israel – where hasbara or PR has often been frowned upon as unnecessary pandering to international opinion that never turns in Israel’s favour anyway – the second Lebanon war underlined the need for a coherent media and PR strategy coordinated at the centre of government.

The post-mortem of the month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006 - known as the Winograd Commission - recommended a centralised approach to hasbara to avoid spokesmen from different ministries, the army or the police telling different or conflicting stories to a voracious local and international media.

Notwithstanding the fact that the head of the new National Information Directorate did not make it to a scheduled interview with our reporter on the story above  – as my colleague Dan Williams reported here the strategy certainly seems to be working for domestic consumption.

Sources inside the Israeli government have said they are generally happy with the way the strategy has worked internationally as well despite growing international calls for a ceasefire and increasingly angry protests around the world.

The media strategy has been backed up by zero tolerance within the military and security establishment for anyone going “off message” - field commanders or political insiders who seemed to relish leaking tid-bits to their favoured reporters in 2006 are now keeping mum.

And while the virtual media war has raged – with pro-Palestinian websites like electronicintifada.net or Hamas’ own website http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/ ratcheting up the rhetoric alongside their Israeli foes – many in the traditional media (or dare I say MSM) complain that they have been totally defeated by Israel’s media strategy which has prevented them from entering Gaza or a ‘closed military zone’ neighbouring Gaza.

The world’s press has been herded on to a hill-top 2 kilometres from the Gaza Strip - where Israeli political and military spokespeople wander among the satellite trucks and live positions ‘briefing’ journalists with the official view of what’s going on inside Gaza.

As much as the protagonists have been duking it out in the virtual world - online media now has the clout to shape the way war stories are told and delivered.

The most surreal example of this is probably Joe the Plumber - yes, that Joe the Plumber of US election campaign fame - who has been engaged by pro-Israeli US website Pajamas Media to file reports from Israeli towns under Hamas rocket fire.

Joe’s basic premise seems to be that the media is inherently biased against Israel and journalists have no business being in the war zone anyway.

While you might not agree with his point-of-view - Joe is an example of the sort of do-it-yourself journalism with a strong voice that has been empowered by the Internet.

Read these two accounts - one from my colleague Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and this one from another Gaza journalist - and I think you’ll agree that reporting from inside a warzone is important, journalists should be there and the combatants should facilitate rather than threaten this effort.

And by the way - in case you were wondering - a GoogleBattle between Israel and Palestine gives Israel a decisive victory. IDF vs. Hamas, though, has Hamas edging it.

PHOTO CREDITS

Photgraphers take pictures of Israeli tanks. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Massive explosion in southern Gaza town of Rafah. REUTERS/Ibrahim abu-Mustafa

The withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from Somalia has left a nation beset by conflict for nearly two decades at a crossroads.

Ethiopia invaded to oust Islamists from the capital, but insurgents still control much of southern Somalia and more hardline groups that worry Washington have flourished during the two-year intervention.

The United Nations is unlikely to send peacekeepers to replace the Ethiopians. Africa is struggling to send more troops to help the 3,500 soldiers from Uganda and Burundi protecting key sites in the capital.

Some analysts say sending an international force would be counterproductive anyway as it would simply replace the Ethiopians as the hated foreign invader and maintain support for the most militant insurgents.

But without more African peacekeepers deploying soon, it seems unlikely the small and largely ineffectual existing force will remain with a weak mandate to face attacks from insurgents.

While a power vacuum may result in even more violence, some Western diplomats in the region hope it will spur the feuding Islamist opposition groups to settle their differences and work towards forming a broad-based, inclusive government.

They also hope the departure of the Ethiopians will deflate the insurgency and marginalise hardline groups imposing a strict version of Islamic law traditionally shunned by many Somalis.

African diplomats pushing hard for some sort of political reconciliation say there are more and more signs of "war fatigue" among the various camps and clans.

They are consistently upbeat about Somalia's prospects, even more so since President Abdullahi Yusuf resigned, and are reaching out to some of the hardline Islamist groups.

Western opposition to some hue of Islamist administration in Somalia -- precisely what Ethiopia invaded to quash -- seems to be waning as diplomats take a more pragmatic approach to the political and military reality on the ground.

Is there any reason for optimism after 17 years of violence?

(Picture: Somali al-Shabaab insurgents arrive in capital Mogadishu, Decemcer 27, 2008. REUTERS/Omar Faruk)