The Irish Independent (registration required) reports that a group of Irish soldiers in Liberia have attacked a group of Liberians.

A crack unit from the Irish Army Ranger Wing has rescued a group of captive villagers who were being beaten and raped by gunmen from renegade Government of Liberia (GOL) forces.

Twenty heavily armed Rangers, part of a special UN operations task group, stormed a container where the 35 men and women were being held prisoner and rescued them.

The Ranger patrol detained the renegade commander, known as "Prince", and the deputy commander of the GOL forces during the rescue operation.

The rest of the kidnap gang is believed to have fled across the border into Guinea.

Acting on an intelligence tip-off, the Irish troops were dropped by helicopter into the town of Gbapa in the northern sector of Nimba county and about 300 kilometres north-east of the Liberian capital, Monrovia.

.    .    .

The two suspects, who are part of a group loyal to former Liberian president Charles Taylor, were then handed over to local police following the rescue on Tuesday evening and were transferred for questioning yesterday to a police station in Monrovia.

Many of the hostages were taken to a medical centre for treatment by local doctors and Irish medics as a result of the rapes and beatings inflicted upon them while in captivity.

I expect the Irish anti-war left to be all over this. And pigs will fly.

UPDATE: Good satire is really hard to do, and should be done only if you have the talent for it, which is why I should try to avoid it. I was sufficiently unclear in the above that I misled Dick O'Brien of Back Seat Drivers into thinking I was condemning the Irish troops. Not in the least. I agree completely with Dublin Gal that the Irish troops should be commended for a job well done. The Irish also did good work in East Timor. My goal was not to pick on the Irish government or its military. It was to abuse the Irish left. The morning I posted it, I was talking to a couple of Irish academic lefties who regularly spew out International ANSWER type stuff, and demanded to know why the Irish mission could be regarded as humanitarian, since the Irish army was not in other trouble spots around the globe. Their response was that the Irish army could not be everywhere, even though they regularly insist that the US occupation of Iraq cannot have a humanitarian element because there are trouble spots in the world where the US has not intervened. They refused to explain the difference to me. As government's go, the Irish government is actually pretty good, and I have a lot of respect for the Irish military. But much of the Irish left is, well, repulsive.

Dont' be silly. Ireland has a UN mandate to be in Liberia. In otherwords, we leave when the UN tells us to. As for the Congo, we volunteered troops for the UN mission, but were turned down.

"Their response was that the Irish army could not be everywhere, even though they regularly insist that the US occupation of Iraq cannot have a humanitarian element because there are trouble spots in the world where the US has not intervened. They refused to explain the difference to me."

could it bw anything to do with the Irish troops being told when and where to go? And that comparing the american army to the irish one is like comparing a Blue Whale's fintail with that of a blue tit.

There Irish is there under a UN Mandate,
not to steal diamonds are you saying that when the 90th Inf Batt comes home all the lads will be down the local jewllers or else looking for flights to Amsterdam or South Africa to flog the stolen diamonds they have. Yeah right, getta grip such bollox I have never heard.

Yery good. If you want to talk about Irish imperialism lookup the behavior of some of our troops in Eritrea -- nothing to be proud of. If Americans behaved as badly the Chomsky reading Dublin 4 crowd would be all over it.

William. Whatever about anyone else, pray that the ARW and ex-members (they cycle though the unit) don't take your attempt at satire personally. Also, the Irish deployed nearly 40,000 defence force personnel on an international basis since 1958. Eritrea, Honduras, Mexico, Lebanon, Congo, Liberia, Cyprus, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and the list goes on..........
And ya know what? We're so good at it that the Iranians suggested that we deploy to Irag and Afghanistan as peace keepers because of our impartiality, ability to speak Arabic and acceptance of local customs. Hell, the UN peacekeeping school is in Ireland.

There are some things you CAN'T take the piss out of. This is one of them. Innocent victims or otherwise, rape and torture is nothing to associate with humour.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Wise-acre.

I've been trawling the net trying to get information on that Operation and this is the first thing I've found. I think that goes some way toward proving how prevailant the 'anti-war' (ani-military, more like) movement is.

We should hear a hell of a lot more about the performance of our troops. Even the secretive SBS has a plethora of books about it on the shelves in Dublin bookshops. None about the ARW.