The Big Question: What's behind the latest crackdown on the Mafia, and can it achieve anything?

Why are we asking this now?

Five hundred soldiers will be dispatched to the province of Caserta, north of Naples, on Saturday as part of the biggest government crackdown on organised crime for years. It follows a multi-pronged assault on the same area earlier this week in which more than 100 alleged gangsters were arrested and 100 million euros' worth of property confiscated.

Roberto Maroni, Italy's interior minister, has described the struggle against organised crime as a war, and this week's action conveys the same sense of determination and resoluteness that was manifested in Sicily in 1992, after the assassinations of the crusading anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

This week's crackdown took place near Naples. But isn't the Mafia a Sicilian phenomenon?

It's true that Sicily is where the word originated and the place where organised crime is still perhaps most deeply entrenched, but the rest of southern Italy has mafias of its own, some of which are today at least as prosperous, well-entrenched and dangerous as their Sicilian cousins.

The most deep-rooted and currently successful is believed to be the 'ndrangheta of Calabria, where the tight family structure of the gangs militates against the emergence of "penitenti" (supergrasses). But the Camorra, the mafia of Naples and surrounding areas, is the wildest, most unpredictable and most violent of all.

So who exactly were the police targeting?

The particular target of the government's actions this week is a "crazed splinter group", as the government defines it, of one particular clan of the Camorra, the ancient and still thriving mafia of Naples, a splinter group of young thugs fuelled by "pitilessness, cocaine and thirst for power" as Corriere della Sera put it yesterday, and who are believed to have killed at least 16 people in their home province in the past five months.

In the massacre two weeks ago that provoked the crackdown, six Africans and an Italian were shot dead in cold blood, for no clear reason other than to spread terror. The victims were not enemies or hold-outs against the gang but merely friendless strangers ripe to be bullied in the most bloodthirsty way, indicated that these killers thought they could get away with anything.

Apart from the bloodshed, what sort of threat do these people pose to Italy?

As Mr Maroni has stressed, what is happening in Campania (the region of which Naples is the capital) generally and in Caserta in particular is a sustained attempt by the gangs to wrest control of the territory from the hands of the state so that the criminals can kill, intimidate and extort without fear of the consequences.

Of course the state and its institutions still exist in these places. There are elected governments, local government offices, police stations and the rest, but as years go by and the blackmail of the gangs does its corrosive work, all these become hollowed out, empty shells whose functionaries, elected representatives and entrepreneurs are all (with brave and lonely exceptions) in varying degrees at the beck and call of the Mob.

How does the most recent massacre fit into this process?

The impudence of the massacre of the Africans told the central government that in Caserta this process was already far advanced: And as is traditional for all Italy's criminal gangs, the Sicilian Mafia in particular, they seem to have managed to persuade themselves that they were the true patriots, doing their plucky best to improve the country. It is likely that the killers of the Africans were motivated by the desire to cleanse their coast of immigrants, making it safe for new (gang-sanctioned) holiday resort investment.

So Caserta can relax now, with the state back in charge?

Hardly. The crackdown is the easy bit. All the really tough challenges lie ahead, in trying to unbundle the mob from the institutions. Nothing in Italy's recent history suggests this is an easy thing to achieve.

But it worked in Sicily, didn't it?

The Sicilian Mafia received a powerful blow when the Italian state reacted vigorously to the murder of the two magistrates in 1992, but the true reason that the Mafia apparently disappeared was a change of strategy by the incoming capo di capi, Bernardo Provenzano, who reversed the aggressive policy of his predecessor, Salvatore Riina, and required his underlings to do their work with the minimum of violence. The strategy worked in Sicily for two reasons: the fact that, after the destruction of rival gangs by the Corleonesi, Provenzano enjoyed the closest thing to absolute power that a mafioso could hope for; and the fact that Sicilians as a whole were so in awe of the Mafia that the resort to violence was rarely required.

So is that the sort of effect we can expect now in Campania?

In your dreams. The Camorra, unlike the Sicilian Mafia, is a wildly anarchic, constantly mutating hell of rival gangs which have been in bloody strife with each other for years. If one gang – the splinter of the Casalesi blamed for the recent rash of murders – is locked away, it is likely that others will quickly pour in to take their place. That's why more than 100 thugs were picked up yesterday, of which only three are held responsible for the recent spate of killings: the rest were held preventively, to stop them piling into the departed gangsters' territory.

Isn't this quite a change in the Italian government's attitude given Silvio Berlusconi's past record?

Quite so. Berlusconi once, long before he entered politics, hired a high-ranking Sicilian mafioso as stable hand at his villa north of Milan. One of his oldest and closest political and business associates, Marcello dell'Utri, a Sicilian, is appealing a conviction and long prison sentence for Mafia association. Berlusconi has in the past availed himself of the right not to answer questions on his alleged links with the Mafia. But new claims have been made recently. The weekly news magazine L'Espresso published two blistering scoops in recent weeks, leaking the testimony of a Camorra supergrass who claimed that Berlusconi's success in solving Naples's chronic rubbish problem was thanks to the cooperation of the Mob – and named the local politician who he said was the middle man.

What was the response to these stories?

They were quickly rubbished by the politician in question. The response of the state was to send the Guardia di Finanza, Italy's much feared Tax Police, into the offices of L'Espresso journalists to carry out a thorough (and thoroughly disruptive) investigation of their accounts.

Will the Italian government bring the Mafia to heel?

Yes...

* Southern Italians are fed up with organised crime and welcome the assault on it

* New confidence in the power of the state will encourage resistance to the Mob

* The courts will deal the Mob a resounding blow, as they did in Sicily in the Nineties

No...

* After years of dominance, the gangs are too deeply entrenched to be shifted now

* Few people in the south can believe the government is in earnest after so little action for so long

* In the middle of a recession, Italy cannot spare the resources required to deal with the problem

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