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Showing posts from May, 2021

Brief Border Wars. The Second Lebanon War: hunting the rocket launcher

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Israeli: Laura Beltrami Hezbollah: Alex Isabelle What the Israelis call the Second Lebanon War is a rather short conflict, which lasted a month or so: from 12th July to 14th August 2006. The implicit tragedy of this umpteenth Arab-Israeli conflict is that it is obviously only a fraction of the state of perpetual warfare that has gripped the Middle East since the '40s; as a result, even though this war took place just fifteen years ago, the reader is likely not to remember much of the exact unfolding of this specific chapter of modern history. We will therefore make a brief summary. The conflict was between the Israeli army and Hezbollah, a militant party born after the first Lebanon war, in 1982, after which Israel had occupied southern Lebanon. Hezbollah received aid from Iran and increased its power by attacking Israeli forces and occasionally American and French forces that supported them. In 2000 Israel left the territory; Hezbollah then settled there definitively, becoming a  ...

Brief Border Wars. The Football War: the Battle of Nacaome

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Scenario:  The Football War Salvadoran: Laura Beltrami Honduran: Alex Isabelle The conflict that goes by the elusive name of "football war" was one of the shortest war in history: it lasted a total of four days, yet this was enough to leave about six thousand dead on the battlefield, more than half of them being civilians. In spite of the name, therefore, it was not a simple brawl between the hooligans of El Salvador and Honduras, but the explosion of tensions accumulated over several years and opportunistically fueled by both governments. On the one hand, the xenophobic policy of the Honduran dictator Oswaldo López Arellano had directed popular anger in the direction of the more or less irregular immigrants who had moved to Honduras due to the overpopulation and the huge employment rate in El Salvador. On the other hand, the latter country was facing a series of domestic political problems: the society was fragmented and unhappy and would have reacted positively to a war wit...