Foreign Correspondent Margot Kiser
Letters to Annie from Kaftanistan
Mombasa Mosque story MOMBASA – Husni Mburak, X years old, strides into the Driftwood club, one of the last young clean cut Swahili of Yemeni descent. once a sleepy port town is now a hectic spared of skyscrapers but now synonymous with drugs and but spared the excesses of skyscrapers. It is laid back representing […]
“Al-Shabab is entirely capable of undertaking complex attacks with or without al-Qaeda’s assistance,” Matt Bryden, former coordinator of the UN Somalia Monitoring Group, told Al Jazeera.
Navy SEALs’ Daring Hostage Rescue May Signal More Somalia Land Raids by U.S. by Margot Kiser Jan 26, 2012 12:20 AM EST The U.S. commando raid by the unit that killed bin Laden suggests that more Somalia land ops might happen, writes Margot Kiser. Plus, Josh Dzieza on Jessica Buchanan, the rescued American aid worker. […]
She asked her captors where they were taking her, and wondered whether they were headed toward Mombasa, farther down the Kenyan coast. But the man running the engine—the Navigator, who had offered her a pair of trousers for warmth—said, “Somalia.”
Life in Mogadishu looks safe and peaceful – until all of a sudden it’s not.
“It is highly unlikely that kidnappers will strike again at tourist areas on Kenya’s north coast,” says Major Emmanual Chirchir, former spokesman during Operation Linda Nchi, Kenya’s military campaign in Somalia to fight Al Shabaab. “But towns and refugee camps like Dadaab near the porous Kenya-Somali border in the northeast remain vulnerable.”
In July 2012 the British High Commission donated a $100K high speed patrol boat to Lamu Administration police to help protect the Lamu Archipelago’s once pirate-infested waters between the fabled tourist destination and Somalia. The High Commission said it planned to donate a second boat to the Kenya Defense Forces. Whichever of the two boats […]
MOGADISHU – Mad Max Gone Wrong FEBRUARY 5-7, 2012 My American travel pal told me back in Nairobi that we’d had a deceptively smooth experience in Mogadishu. Mogadishu is the sort of place that on the surface may strike you as surprisingly safe and peaceful; residents going about their daily business of selling basics in […]
Mar 21, 2012 3:44 PM EDT Margot Kiser reports from Nairobi on the successful ransom of British citizen Judith Tebbutt. On Tuesday afternoon, in the small inland Somali town of Adado, law enforcement officials gazed skyward as a single-engine aircraft circled close overhead. The plane—a U.K.-owned KingAir 200 operated by the British company Phoenix […]
Kenya’s president Kibaki presided over the much anticipated and often delayed ground-breaking ceremony yesterday for construction of the Lamu port, slated to be the continent’s second largest deep-water port. The Lamu port is the keystone of Kenya’s ambitious “Vision 2030”, part of a transport and economic corridor — THE LAMU-PORT-SOUTH-SUDAN-TRANSPORT-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CORRIDOR (LAPSSET), a multi-billion […]
