It’s Just Africa: Oil, Guns, and Sectarian Violence in South Sudan

The United Nations confirmed that this past Tuesday, a U.N. peacekeeping helicopter on a routine cargo flight had been shot down as it flew over the oil-producing Unity State in South Sudan. UTair, the Russian airline that owns the aircraft, speculated that the helicopter was shot down with a surface to air missile. Of the four crew members who had been on board, one (the co-pilot) is alive and being treated for minor injuries by Médecins sans Frontières, but the other three (commander, flight engineer, and flight attendant) had been killed. UTair, which has been working with the UN since 1991, stated that it would temporarily halt flights over this area.

The UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) confirmed that the Mi-8 helicopter, which was contracted to the UN Mission and had been flying from Wau in the southwest region of Sudan to Bentiu in the north, had crashed about 6 miles south of Bentiu. A spokesperson for the governor of Northern Bahr el-Ghazal State claimed that the South Sudanese rebel commander had warned the UN last week not to fly over his territory. At peace talks in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the rebel delegation issued a statement denying the South Sudanese government accusations. The rebel statement stated that “the area in which the (aircraft) was reportedly shot down is government-held territory, if indeed the aircraft was shot down.”

Iraq: The Middle East’s Ticking Time Bomb

On December 18, 2011, Iraqis watched in mixed fear and jubilation as the last US tanks rolled across the border into Kuwait, marking an official end to the American-led invasion in 2003. Two years later in 2013, those fears seem to have borne out while jubilation is in short supply: civilian deaths are reaching levels not seen since the Iraqi civil war of 2007-2009, and massive attacks have become a regular facet of everyday life. In September alone, there were nearly 1,000 deaths, 800 of which were civilians. Even this was shy of the 2013 high of 1,057 deaths in July. Sectarian, regional, and tribal divides have widened, not subsided, and the Maliki government itself is a hotbed of corruption, poor governance, and has lost the public’s faith as a democratic institution. The current path of Iraq indicates at best a pattern of cyclical violence, and at worst a nearly unstoppable march back to civil war.

Qasim Ahmad Tahan carries the body of his 5-year-old son Walid.
Courtesy AP.

Yet chances are, you haven’t seen Iraq in the headlines in a while. Violent acts have become so frequent that they hardly make it on Twitter reports. On Monday alone, 15 car bombs went off in Baghdad, which, as the BBC’s Michael Knights points out, “would have been an unprecedented event...[i]n any other country.” In Iraq, it was the 38^th attack of this kind in the last 12 months. Given that the current security crisis began but did not end with the US occupation of 2003-2011, American policymakers should be scrambling to figure out a way to aid the Maliki government in combatting the violence. With a civil war next door in Syria and unrest in Egypt, instability is spreading like disease throughout the region in the wake of the Arab Awakening’s derailing by autocrats. Combined with US war weariness with Iraq itself, it appears that the US can or will do little to stem the tide of what is becoming a river of blood.