Somalia

I loved this column by Ralph Peters regarding the retreating Islamists in Somalia. Here's the end, read the whole thing!

For now, it's worth popping that leftover bottle of champagne. Somalia's homegrown fanatics and their al Qaeda allies are on the run; the Ethiopian military is hunting down wanted terrorists (including several implicated in the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania), and our enemies have lost a safe haven, a money-laundering capital, a smuggler's paradise and a launching pad for subversion.
The ideal of a perfect, eternal victory - to which the media hold those who battle terrorism - is an unfair standard. A win that overthrows a terrorist regime, whether in Afghanistan or Somalia, is worth the fight, even if the enemy can't be completely eradicated. Desperate terrorists struggling for survival are always preferable to a terrorist regime in the capital city.
There's plenty more trouble to come in the Horn of Africa. But the good guys won this round, and nay-saying pundits can't put the terrorists back in power in Mogadishu.

And as long as you're reading, here is a man on the street article from Mogadishu out of the LATimes. (yes, it's hard to know what's true in these)
Anyway it sounds like the top guys in that Islamic Courts ran away and didn't bother telling the boots on the ground. Those boots aren't very happy. From a woman who took up arms to assist her husband fighting for the Islamists.

She too blamed Siad, the Islamists' security officer, for ordering his troops into battle and then fleeing the country. She and others called him a traitor who was possibly working with the Ethiopians to undermine the courts.

"Now we hate him more than the invaders," she said. "If we see him, we will cut him to pieces."

Interesting that they allow her to "cut him to pieces" but not while showing a cheekbone.