Mauritania has been moving quite a bit in the last couple days.

The big news here is that an Islamic group in Algeria thought we weren’t Islamic enough and came over and killed 15 of our soldiers. I’ve not been able to find any reports of it online, but supposedly they were all beheaded.

Mauritania catches a lot of grief for being not Islamic enough. Maybe the “Islamic Republic” thing sets the bar too high. People complain of us having diplomatic ties to Israel. The Israeli embassy just put out a huge (10′) flag, which I thought was a bit ostentatious, but what they hey. Also, them being friendly with us is not popular with much of the Western world. I like this Ajazeera article bearing the damning caption, “Maaouya Ould Taya is a staunch American ally.” (They misspelt Maaouiya.)

I’ve been hearing rumors of Mauritania heading up through Mali to retaliate, but I can’t find any news of it. I’ll have to buy a paper on my way home.

Things have been a little more active than normal. The students wander around yelling from time to time now, and there’s a definite rise in graffiti. It’s all in Arabic though, so I’ve got no real clue what it’s about. There was a big protest march tonight and several of my students couldn’t get to class because the roads were blocked off. I need to find out what exactly was being protested. I think the marches against our change to a Saturday/Sunday (from Friday/Saturday which it was since the 70′s) have finally tapered off. People are like the French here. You’ve got to seriously piss Americans off before they take to the streets and start wandering around waving signs. You just need some bad croissants to get the French up in arms.

I don’t want to make it sound like things are going crazy or anything. They’re not. People are all still really friendly to me and I get lots of “American good” responses to queries as to my nationality. As is often the case it is a small group of vocal people causing trouble. It just makes for good gossip.