Do we laugh or do we cry? From Inter-Press Service, Jan. 29:

Resolving the conflicts in Somalia and Darfur will extend well beyond the two-day African Union (AU) summit, according to academics and civil society activists.

Ethiopian occupation troops in Somalia are reportedly hunting down Ethiopian Oromo refugees living in the country. Allied Somali militias are also said to be abducting Oromos and handing them over to Ethiopian troops for reward money. Ethiopian forces in Somalia are reportedly claiming that the refugees are all members of the Oromo rebel forces fighting the Ethiopian government.

Last week's US air raids in the Lower Juba region of southern Somalia near the Kenyan border, caused heavy civilian casualties, according to local reports. Some of the attacks apparently hit groups of nomadic herdsmen on their way to watering holes. Reports of civilian casualites run as high as 80 dead, with large numbers of cattle, goats and other livestock wiped out as well. Thousands of local residents are said to be fleeing towards the border. But with the border sealed, aid workers from Doctors Without Borders and other groups have been unable to cross into the region from Kenya to assist or verify the claims. The air strikes near the towns of Hagar, Bur Gabo, Banka Jiro, Bada Madow and Ras Kamboni areas are said to have continued for three days. (HornAfrik Radio via BBC Monitoring, Jan. 11)

Ethiopian and US forces are still in pursuit of three supposed al-Qaida militants originally said to have been killed in the US airstrike of Jan. 8, with an anonymous "senior US official" in Kenya telling AP that they all survived the raid. The official confirmed the US "special operations forces" were in Somalia, but said they were focused only on tracking down the suspected terrorists and not members of the Somali Islamist militia. "The three high-value targets are still of intense interest to us," the official said. "What we're doing is still ongoing, we're still in pursuit, us and the Ethiopians."

Unknown Somali fighters opened fire with automatic weapons and launched rockets at Ethiopian and allied Somalian troops in Mogadishu Jan. 9. The attack came as the troops had established themselves in a building formerly used by the police force. No casualties have yet been reported, but the gunfight lasted several minutes, and was the second attack targeting Ethiopian troops in Somalia's capital in the past three days. Somalia's Ethiopia-backed interim government has postponed plans to disarm the public for the moment, but pledges to carry them out—by force if necessary. (Garowe Online, Somalia, Jan. 9)

Another sign of Nigeria's social breakdown—and similar tensions are reported from Ghana. From Xinhua, Jan. 9:

Six persons were killed at the weekend in a bloody clash between herdsmen and farmers in Korenganuwa village in Nigeria's northwestern state of Zamfara, the official News Agency of Nigeria reported on Monday.

A pretty astounding figure. But as we noted the last time it happened, in May: when resource hyper-exploitation co-exists with dire poverty, such incidents are absolutely inevitable. From IRIN, Dec. 28:

LAGOS - The Nigerian Red Cross has taken the lead in responding to the latest pipeline blast in Lagos on Tuesday that killed at least 269 people and left scores of others severely burned.

Fighting exploded between Islamic Courts Union (ICU) forces and the "official" Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of Somalia Dec. 20, just as the ICU's deadline for Ethiopian troops to quit the country or face a declaration of "jihad" expired. Rocket, mortar and machine-gun battles since have centered on the area around Baidoa where the TFG is based. But ICU leaders emphasize that they consider the real enemy to be the Ethiopian forces. "We are at war with Ethiopia, but not with the (Somali) government," ICU leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys told Reuters by telephone. (Reuters, Dec. 21)