The War on(of) Terror Continues to Unravel

As Bliar starts to pack his things at number 10, his legacy, Iraq and its fall out continues to burn...

In Basra, militants launched an attack on the UK base in response to the killing of their leader:

In apparent retaliation for the killing of their commander, Mahdi Army militiamen launched a fierce 2 and a half-hour assault on a British base in the southern Shiite city of Basra. The British military must have been alarmed by the assault, since they called in an air strike on the militiamen. Basra crowds said that the airstrike killed 8 innocent civilians and held a public funeral procession for them.

In Afghanistan another solider is killed and four injured in clashes:

A British soldier was killed and four others wounded in Afghanistan on Friday night in heavy fighting. The death was the third this week by British forces in the Middle East. Two other deaths have been reported.

In Somalia the violence continues:

At least one person has been killed and four others were wounded when a roadside bomb went off in north of Mogadishu, Somalia capital on Saturday

In Lebanon, the blowback from covert ops starts to get nasty:

As Seymour Hersh first reported, in an article penned back in March, the U.S. has begun to fund various Sunni extremist groups as part of what Condoleezza Rice refers to as “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East”...This policy appears to have backfired in Lebanon, where a militant Sunni group, Fatah al-Islam, has drawn the Lebanese army into the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared. Rather than acting as a counter to local Shia bogeyman, Hezbollah, the current backlash has Hezbollah and the U.S.-backed Lebanese army colluding in order to crush the intransigent Salafists.

Some legacy.