Israel is continuing "targetted assassinations" in supposedly unoccupied Gaza. But internecine Palestinian violence, alas, now seems equally efficient in killing off the Palestinian leadership.

An Israeli missile strike on a car in Gaza City May 20 killed a top Islamic Jihad commander, Mohammed Dahdouh. A Palestinian woman, Hanan Aman, her 4-year-old son Mohanad and a female relative Naima Aman were also killed in the attack, and three others wounded. (Al-Bawaba, May 20)

A front-page story in today's New York Times paints an even more desperate picture of the deteriorating situation in Darfur than usual. Lydia Polgreen reports from Tina, a village that was overrun April 19 and the residents forced to flee to the overstretched and over-crowded refugee camp at Tawila. Only this time the armed horsemen who swept through, burning, looting, shooting and raping, were not Janjaweed, but a faction of the Sudan Liberation Army, the major guerilla group resisting the Sudanese pro-government forces. The SLA has splintered, with the faction that signed the recent peace accord turning against the more intransigent faction which has held out, calling the accords a sham. The ostensibly pro-peace faction is now attacking civilian villages, mimicking the tactics of their Janjaweed enemies. Again, there is an ethnic dimension: the supposedly pro-peace faction is led by ethnic Zaghawa, who are traditionally semi-nomadic herdsmen, while the hold-out faction is led by sedentary, agricultural Fur, who are the big majority in Darfur ("Land of the Fur"). "It was the Zaghawa who did this," a Tina sheikh told Polgreen. "We used to fear the Arab janjaweed. Now we have another janjaweed."

From the London Times, May 20:

THE largest prisoner uprising yet at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre was reported by the US military yesterday as the UN watchdog on torture called for the camp to be shut down.

From Long Island Newsday, May 18:

Two teenage girls and a 25-year-old man were killed Wednesday morning when their car rear-ended a parked tractor-trailer on a busy two-lane road in Brentwood, Suffolk police said.

A judicial ruling against a teacher who wore the hejab inspires an assassination of a judge—which in turn sparks a mass mobilization against the Islamists. Whatever one thinks of the Ataturk-era policy of mandatory secularism, the politics of this one are pretty interesting. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the (moderately) Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi) condemned the killing, but was much more vociferous in his denials that his own statements about the ruling might have helped inspire it. (Hurriyet, May 19) Then he refused to attend the funeral. (Financial Times, May 18) From The Independent, May 18:

Thousands march in Turkey to denounce Islamic gunman's attack

More than 15,000 Turks, from students to judges still in their robes, marched in the capital to support secularism and to condemn a courtroom shooting that killed one judge and wounded four others.

Talk about Phyrric victories. The quick overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 paved the way for the invasion of Iraq and the quick overthrow of Saddam Hussein a year and a half later. Now, just as Iraq is spinning horribly out of control, it looks like Afghanistan is going in the same direction. Tom Coughland writes for the UK Independent, May 19:

Violence escalates in Afghanistan

The storming of Musa Qala was ferocious. Hundreds of Taliban fighters poured incessant fire into the government buildings and police station. The ensuing battle was the longest and fiercest since the end of the war four years ago. As homes and shops were set alight, Qari Mohammed Yousef, a Taliban commander, used his satellite telephone to announce to a news agency that the town in Helmand had fallen to the "forces of Islam".

Remember all those wacky conspiracy theorists who said that "liberating" Afghanistan from the Taliban was really about building an oil pipeline through the country? From India's Rediff.com, May 19:

India joins Afghanistan gas pipeline project
The Cabinet on Thursday approved India joining the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan natural gas pipeline and the inclusion of 1,113 km of national highways for upgradation under the third phase of the National Highway Development Project.

Today's Wall Street Journal features a maddening front-page story on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch parliamentarian of Somali birth who has been facing death threats for her opposition to Islamism. She has just announced that she is finally leaving Holland following protests from...her neighbors at the luxury housing complex where she lives in opulent high security! They have launched a campaign to evict her, and actually had the chutzpah to argue in court that her peresence in the building was a violation of their "human rights" because the threat of terrorist attack is driving down property values and the security measures mean long waits for the elevator! The courts rejected these scurrilous arguments, but ruled Hirsi Ali must leave anyway because her presence poses a physical threat to her neighbors, and does therefore violate their "human rights." She was given four months to leave in April. Hirsi Ali responded by invoking bitter memories of World War II: "My neighbors seem to confirm the critical veiw that very few Dutch people were brave enough during the Nazi occupation."