Mining controversy:The latest batch of, well, let us say 'questionable' reporting on the Middle East is the story that Somali fighters were fighting alongside Hizb Allah forces during the Israeli-Hizb Allah mini-war. The story, supposedly contained in a U.N. report leaked to Reuters, was denied by the Israelis, who one assumes would know.

The whole idea is faintly ridiculous. So a bunch of hardline Salafi SICS militants, in the midst of fighting their own civil war, somehow get in touch with Hizb Allah recruiters, drop everything and head north. So what are we supposed to assume, that 700 armed Africans were running around the comparatively small battlefront and nobody, including the IDF, noticed?

This is totally counterintuitive. SICS militiamen are largely untrained irregulars with cast-off Soviet arms and a background in fighting other thugs in low-intensity street fights, with no track record of exporting their own violence abroad. Hizb Allah is an Iranian-trained paraprofessional force with modern American and Iranian weapons, tactical and strategic training, and experience in combined-arms maneuvers against a deadly and disciplined Israeli foe. Taking on a bunch of Somali one-offs would be like the U.S. going to war with the Crips as an auxiliary. Even ignoring Sunni-Shi'a sectarianism, Hizb Allah does not play well with others, and prefers to keep its military activites in-house.

And the supposed quid pro quo is iffy, too. Iran doesn't have a huge amount of uranium, but its ten or so mines are expected to have around 5,000 tons of recoverable reserves. Somalia is estimated to have 6,600 tons of recoverable reserves and has no actual production. The uranium deposits are believed to be primarily in the Galguduud region, where the Islamists maintain a significant presence in the city of Dhusa Mareb, so it's not physically impossible to get to it, but in order to make this happen you'd either have to start up large-scale mining and refining operations in a volatile warzone, or else strip-mine and truck hundreds of thousands of tons of ore to a port city and ship it up the Persian Gulf to Iran for processing.

Doesn't make much sense. I'm sure we'll hear more going forward, but for now this all sounds too bizarre to be believed.