Episode 29 - Largest Crowd in History, Kenya Terror Attack and Syria Ambush

A terror attack in Kenya, US troops killed in Syria and the closest you can get to Hell on earth, in my opinion.  All that coming up on today's episode of the Hot Zone.

 

Hi everyone.  They call it the Kumbh Mela.  It's a Hindu Pilgrimage that happens in India every few years.  And this year they are saying it will be the largest gathering of human beings in one place ever.  120 million people.  It's hard to even grasp a crowd that size, which is equal to the entire population of Japan.  All those happy Hindus will be descending on a place called....Prayagraj...oh heck no.  No way I can pronounce that.  Anyway, it's a city in the north of India where three sacred rivers converge.    All these people are coming to bathe in those rivers to wash away their sins.  Let's hope nobody downstream is planning on drinking from that waterway anytime soon.  Blech.  

 

I thought a trip to Disney was about as close to Hell as I ever wanted to get.  The older I get the less I like large crowds of people.  But 120 million people all at one place?  Just makes me shudder.  

 

 

Another horrible terror attack happened in Kenya on Tuesday when al Shabaab gunman charged a upscale Hotel in Nairobi's Westgate district. And detonated bombs in the lobby before taking hostages and holding a standoff with Kenyan police and military for several hours. 

 

So far, 15 people are dead and many more wounded.   The Kenyan president made a statement on Wednesday afternoon that the hotel had been retaken and clean up has begun.

 

Al Shabaab is a terror group from Somalia that has been responsible for many horrific terror attacks in Kenya and elsewhere over the past several years. In 2013, they took over a shopping mall in the same area of Nairobi and eventually killed over 60 people.

 

They also attacked the Garissa college in Kenya in April 2015 and murdered 147 students.  These monsters are some of the most cowardly air thieves known to man, and the scale of their brutality knows no bounds.

 

There are hundreds of thousands of Somali living in Kenya, mostly in slums in the countries north.  They left their own country because of the violence, but the violence followed them.  They have been subject to incredible hardship and violence in Kenya as well.  Islamic extremists have infiltrated the refugee camps and use them as recruiting grounds among the disaffected youth who live there. The situation got so bad that the Kenyan government

decided to close the world's largest refugee camp at Dadaab, back in 2016, 330,000 mostly Somali refugees lived there. And Kenya tried to send them all back to Somalia.  That didn't go over well with the international aid community.

 

Human rights groups called it dangerous and even illegal to do so. But after the massacre at the university in Garissa, the Kenyan government called closing the camp a national security issue. The bottom line is that Somalia is literally one of the worst places in the world. I've been there several times. And it's hard to even describe just how bad the living conditions are in that region. The people there really don't know anything different, however, And so coming from such a brutal and lawless culture, it's very hard to assimilate them into other cultures,  Especially Western culture.

 

Thousands of Somalis have left their country and moved to Minnesota of all places and are beginning to have a major effect on the culture and politics of the Minneapolis St. Paul area. A few years ago, we did an investigation about Somali young men who were leaving Minnesota and going back to Somalia to fight for ISIS before returning to spread their ideology back in the United States. Check it out.

 

Now let's move over to Syria. On Wednesday. A bomb went off near a US patrol in Syria's northern city of Manbij, killing at least 14 people, including some Americans. The Islamic State claimed the attack and said a terrorist with an explosive vest had struck the patrol as it neared the local market in that city, which has been home to most of the US presence in Syria for several years.  

 

Now, I get asked from time to time the question of how could a Christian be a soldier and possibly have to kill people?

My answer has always incorporated a situation kind of like what we see here in Syria. If I'm a soldier standing guard over a marketplace in Syria, and I see a suicide attacker wearing an explosive vest charging towards the market. I have only seconds to make a decision. And as a Christian, that decision should reflect the love of Christ as much as possible. So the question is, what's the most loving thing I can do at that moment? Question or? Well, obviously the most loving thing I can do for the innocent people shopping in the market is to shoot the attacker in the face and stop the threat. But I would also submit that shooting him is the most loving thing I can do for him as well because I will be stopping him from committing a horrific sin for which he will have to answer to the Most High God 

 

Indeed. If you were to ask me now, as I sit here in my right mind, what I would want you to do if one day for some reason I lose my mind, and let's say take over a daycare center and threatened to kill the children inside. I would tell you right now thinking clearly that I would hope you would do whatever it took to stop me, including killing me if it meant saving those precious little children. So sometimes violence is the answer. Sometimes it's the only answer. It's not clear with this attack in Syria, whether the attack happened because of the announced pull out of US troops from the region, which President Trump suddenly decided a few weeks ago. In reality, the situation on the ground probably isn't that nuanced. What I mean is we have enemies there who will take whatever opportunity they can get to kill us.

And the greater politics being waged in Washington probably don't affect those decisions all that much.

 

The bottom line is that Since we put troops into Syria in 2014, we had only lost two soldiers up to this point through enemy action. So the event on Wednesday may have doubled or even tripled the total death toll by US troops in the region. And that may be one of the reasons why Donald Trump decided to pull out troops because the political capital that gets burned every time an American soldier dies in combat is just too costly in his mind now, I've heard some rumblings that we may still keep a presence in that region. By hiring private military contractors to do the job that US troops were doing, and that's one thing I'm going to be investigating. When I go to Syria next week. To say the situation over there is dire would be a major understatement. Fox News is reporting that at least 15 children have died in the last month in Syria because of freezing temperatures and poor medical care. And that's another reason I want to go because I want to bring you the stories of the people who are suffering because of this war. And as I always say on this podcast. I want to give you an opportunity to reach into those people's lives and help them directly and see how much good a little bit of money can do to help people on their worst day. So I don't know if I'm going to have very good internet access while I'm on the ground in Syria, but you can bet I will be filming everything that happens and bringing those stories to you just as soon as I get somewhere with enough bandwidth to send them if you'd like to be involved in helping me help those people.

 

There's still time to send a donation either by PayPal or by going to patreon.com slash hot zone and subscribing to this podcast, my goal is to take the money that you send and help people directly and get their stories right back to you.

So I hope you will join us and I look forward to partnering with you this year to help as many people as we can.