Tag Archives: over-the-edge

Moments before twin bomb blasts tore through crowds of football fans. Photo: AFP/Getty Images Darren Foster is a producer for Vanguard. Just a few months ago, I sat down for a final dinner in Uganda with Vanguard correspondent Mariana van Zeller and producer Alex Simmons. We were joined by a couple of other foreign reporters who we had become friendly with while covering the country’s controversial anti-gay legislation. One of them, a French photojournalist who is based in Uganda, suggested the place: Ethiopian Village, a leafy outdoor restaurant that’s as popular for its food as for its giant projection screen. Expats—journalists, missionaries, NGO workers—along with Ugandans regularly gather at Ethiopian Village to watch big sporting events. And that was the scene last night when a large crowd gathered to watch the World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands. The match was entering the final minutes of regular time when a bomb ripped through the packed restaurant. A near simultaneous explosion tore through a rugby field where large screens showing the match had drawn hundreds of spectators. At last count, 74 people were killed, and many more injured. While reporting in Uganda this kind of terrorism was the furthest thing from our mind. Kampala is a safe and peaceful city. But as early as last week, the leader of the Somali Islamist group, Al-Shabaab, threatened to launch an attack on Uganda, whose troops are part of the African Union peacekeeping force in Mogadishu. Also, lost in the bigger headline of New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman’s recent story about child soldiers working for the US-backed government in Somalia was the fact that many of the government forces are trained in Uganda. The Ugandan military dismissed the threat from Al-Shabaab. They may have thought that Uganda was too far outside the scope of international terror. And while many are reporting that this is Al-Shabaab’s first strike outside of Somalia, that’s not entirely accurate. Al Shabab is a franchise of a global network. A network that put itself on the map with another coordinated bombing in East Africa. In 1998, al Qaeda simultaneously bombed the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania killing hundreds of people. Lawrence Wright reported in his excellent book on al Qaeda, The Looming Tower, that it was Osama bin Laden’s hope that the bombings would draw the US into Afghanistan, where he had recently moved al Qaeda. All bin Laden got were a few cruise missiles. But three years later, after the Sept. 11 attacks, he finally got his wish. Since then, Afghanistan and Iraq have largely defined the war on terror. But as the bombings in Kampala show, with terrorism the battlefield isn’t always so clear or obvious. added by: dmfoster