In the Sudan, members of a fundamentalist Islamic movement took control. As that new fundamentalist government tried to consolidate its control, in the south anti-fundamentalist forces, led by a non-Muslim, held out against the wave of Jihadists.

Europe, swept by anti-Muslim sentiments and a sense of their own righteousness and self-importance, sends a multi-national force to relieve the beleaguered holdouts in Southern Sudan. The Jihadists fuel the flames of mutual hatred by demanding that a leading European leader come to the Sudan to submit and convert to Islam.

As the multi-national force was dispatched, it was beset from the beginning by poor management and greed. The very route they took to reach the Sudan was determined not by military strategy, but by the desire for certain vested interests to profit from the military action. Even as private individuals profited, the military expedition proved a disaster. The multi-national force was poorly supplied and took their anger out on the natives, slaughtering innocent lives, turning the natives against them almost immediately. Atrocities were committed by BOTH sides, making both side's claims to moral superiority a farce.

This is not today. This was in the mid-1880's when Mahdist rebels took over in the Sudan, then jointly mismanaged by Egypt and Britain. The southern holdouts were led by the Emin Pasha, who was actually a German Jew, originally named Eduard Schitzer. The European nations sent a relief force, but the greed of people like Belgian and Congolese King Leopold II (who later presided over one of the worst holocausts in history), British merchants hoping to get their greedy hands on ivory, and various newspapers who wanted some good stories, led to the relief effort going through the Belgian Congo (then called the "Congo Free State" but was actually a private domain of King Leopold). Look on a map. This route makes no sense militarily and by the time the relief effort reached the Sudan, half its members had died of disease and starvation and needed to be helped by the Emin Pasha. In the meantime, the Mahdist threat had retreated...until the abuses by the European relief expedition stirred up native anger again, giving the Emin Pasha a new situation to deal with.

The self-righteousness of the Muslim Jihadist fanatics as well as the white "Crusaders" haven't changed much. Nor has the arena of their conflict. Both Afghanistan and the Sudan have been regions of ongoing conflict between fanatics on both sides for centuries. And, I would add, the atrocities on both sides haven't changed. Both sides happily torture and wage war in the name of all that is good and pure against the evil brutality of the other side. And both sides grow to be hated and distrusted by the natives who get the brunt of the fighting.

Things have not changed from the 19th to the 21st century.