Setting up effective, local security forces

**davidbfpo** · 07-12-2017

This quote is from an academic conference on 'War and Peace' @ Leeds University recently and one paper appears very relevant:

Nir Arielli (Leeds) gave a fascinating paper on the role played by Italian colonial troops in the suppression of anti-Italian colonial revolt. The key forces in the brutal repression of the revolt against Italian rule in Libya were in fact Eritrean (and Somali) Ascari. The question of the part which colonial forces have played in small wars and counter-insurgency operations is one which has been little studied and which offers the potential for new insights into social and political dynamics of empire as well as military structures...

Link:https://defenceindepth.co/2017/07/12...ds-15-16-june/

The author is a Professor @ Leeds University and his bio indicates this article contains more:

'Colonial soldiers in Italian counter-insurgency operations in Libya, 1922-32', British Journal for Military History, 1, no. 2 (2015), pp. 47-66.

Link:https://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/profile...43/nir_arielli

The BJMH paper is available free via and will be read soon:http://bjmh.org.uk/index.php/bjmh/article/view/29/21

Note Italian recruited Ascari (Askari) also featured in the 1936 invasion of Abysinia and the opposition to the 1941 Allied invasion of Abysina (Ethiopia), Eritrea and Italian Somailand; as covered in the book reviewed in:An obscure 'small war' in WW2

There is a reverse aspect, the violent suppression in Abyssinia of opposition to Italian occupation and a new book covers that. From the publisher's summary:

In February 1937, following an abortive attack by a handful of insurgents on Mussolini’s High Command in Italian-occupied Ethiopia, ‘repression squads’ of armed Blackshirts and Fascist civilians were unleashed on the defenceless residents of Addis Ababa. In three terror-filled days and nights of arson, murder and looting, thousands of innocent and unsuspecting men, women and children were roasted alive, shot, bludgeoned, stabbed to death, or blown to pieces with hand-grenades (est. 19k died). Meanwhile the notorious Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, infamous for his atrocities in Libya, took the opportunity to add to the carnage by eliminating the intelligentsia and nobility of the ancient Ethiopian empire in a pogrom that swept across the land.

Link:http://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/...baba-massacre/