The US role in Somalia's misery

November 21, 2008
Issue 

Outgoing US President George Bush has often stated that history will be the rightful judge of his legacy. Some academics, such as John Lewis Gaddis and Fareed Zakaria, have already begun early revisions to the Bush years.

But as historians mark the final score, they must not omit a serious examination of the administration's policies in Somalia, the consequences of which promise to reverberate for decades to come. Somalia today is approaching a cataclysm not seen since the early 1990s.

The US role, scarcely understood inside the US itself, has added in no small part to the misery that once again engulfs the war-weary Horn of Africa nation.

The brutal Ethiopian military occupation that began on Christmas Eve 2006 has sustained heavy losses over the past 20 months. The conflict has strained Ethiopian resources and it is currently reviewing its overall strategy.

What remains of Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG), barring a massive new foreign military intervention, teeters on the edge of collapse.

Pirates and warlords

In its place, a powerful Islamist insurgency is strengthening rapidly. Warlordism, criminality, and piracy are also reaching new heights.

All the while, the Somali population remains under siege, caught between the abuses of all sides as a society literally disintegrates.

Underwriting a significant portion of the bloodshed, however, has been a US administration engaged in expansive warfare with a preference for covert military operations.

Somalia has long been of strategic interest to US policy makers. The country sits aside the strait of Bab al-Mandeb, a key oil transit waterway between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean — the second closest point between Africa and the Middle East.

During the Cold War, the US-allied dictatorship of General Siad Barre was the longtime recipient of generous amounts of US military and economic largesse. In 1991, after years of unrest, rebellion, and protracted drought, Barre's regime collapsed into the famine, war, and chaos now virtually synonymous with the word Somalia.

Then-president George H. W. Bush ordered US forces into the country a year later in support of the United Nations relief program, culminating in the Battle of Mogadishu and the now-famous "Black Hawk Down" incident.

Following withdrawal and international disengagement, no single actor was strong enough to establish and maintain control. Somalia fractured along semi-permanent tribal lines and warlord fiefdoms that would come to define the country's social and political landscape.

For more than a decade and a half, the territory was left to fester in ungoverned criminality and violence, only rarely piercing international headlines.

Union of Islamic Courts

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US and the wars in the Middle East brought renewed US focus to the Horn of Africa.

For sometime, a diverse group of Islamists, clan leaders, businessmen, militia heads, and civic actors had been coalescing into what would in 2005 become the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a heterogeneous movement seeking to establish a semblance of law and order after years of chaos.

The UIC proved itself a well-organised, disciplined and effective civil administrator. It was popular with average Somalis, even the less devout, all of whom were desperate for relief from the criminal gangs and brutality that had long ruled their country.

The Islamists also began to challenge the weak, faction-ridden TFG — the successor to thirteen previous failed attempts at creating a central government — which had been confined to the provincial town of Baidoa, headed by President Abdullahi Yusuf, a strongman closely linked to Mogadishu's warlords.

Alarmed at the UIC's growing strength and popularity, in early 2006, the CIA began supplying significant quantities of arms and money to a coalition of secular Mogadishu warlords under the name Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism.

Part of the CIA program had been a poorly conceived attempt to hunt down the small number of al-Qaeda affiliated individuals involved in the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania — then thought to be hiding in Somalia.

But the operation failed disastrously and "the payoffs added to an anarchic situation that led many Somalis to turn to the Islamic Courts for protection", according to a May 13, 2007 Washington Post article by David Ignatius.

Recognising the increasing power of the US-backed Alliance, the Islamists struck preemptively and decisively, routing the warlords and seizing control of Mogadishu within a matter of weeks. For six months in 2006, the UIC proceeded to establish security and the provision of basic social services in much of Somalia for the first time in 15 years.

The peace provided by the Islamists also came with more conservative social policies and a type of sharia law. For average Somalis, however, the security of the UIC brought a brief respite from their usual suffering.

The Bush administration, seeing Somalia through the lens of its "war on terror", and having botched the earlier warlord program, began stepping up aid to longtime ally and neighboring Ethiopian autocrat, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

Zenawi has held power in Ethiopia since the early 1990s and his regime is less than democratic. During a crackdown against popular protests after fraudulent elections in 2005, Zenawi's security forces massacred nearly 200 people, injured 760 and arrested 20,000, according to an October 19, 2006 BBC News report.

Nonetheless, since 2002, Ethiopia has received nearly US$25 million in overt US military assistance, while at least 100 US military personnel currently work inside the country in advisory positions as part of what the Pentagon characterizes as a "close working relationship" with the Ethiopian military, according to a January 7 USA Today report.

Ethiopian invasion

Less than two weeks before the December 2006 Ethiopian invasion, US assistant secretary of state for African affairs Jendayi Frazer publicly declared that "The Council of Islamic Courts is now controlled by al-Qaeda cell individuals, east Africa al-Qaeda cell individuals".

The claim was dubious and no evidence was provided.

Horn of Africa specialist Ken Menkhaus noted in a February 11 Middle East Desk article that the UIC "movement as a whole was far from an al-Qaeda front. Only three foreign al-Qaeda operatives were said by the US to be in hiding in Mogadishu, a number far lower than those suspected of residing in neighboring Kenya."

Frazer went on to warn of "a risk Al Qaeda may take up bases in Somalia" but denied the US would take military action against the Courts.

Behind the scenes, US General John Abizaid had already visited Ethiopia to express some last minute reservations to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

The decision had been made, though, and ultimately Washington lent its support to the invasion.

The Ethiopian military crossed the Somali border on December 24, 2006 and, according to a February 9 British Independent article, "CIA agents traveled with the Ethiopian troops, helping to direct operations".

The US also provided important satellite intelligence and other battleground information from unmanned Predator drones.

"A lot of what we taught them was used to fight that global War on Terror", observed a US military advisor who had trained Ethiopian soldiers now fighting in Somalia, the Independent reported.

In terms of weaponry, he noted, "They got what they needed".

US special forces also conducted periodic operations inside Somali territory, possibly moving out of a rumoured CIA base in eastern Ethiopia.

The full extent and exact type of activities is not known, but reports of the troop movements have been confirmed by Somali officials.

According to a February 13 Newsweek article TFG Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein explained that "the presence of the CIA, the presence of [US] troops, is not a big issue. We like that they are here.

"But right now they don't have a permanent military presence. They come in and out."

US warships moved into position off the coast of Somalia in anticipation of coming operations. Acting on intelligence from the ground, Washington ordered bombing raids targeting what it believed to be Islamic militants.

Atrocities

US-piloted AC-130 gunships and cruise missiles have blasted Somali territory at least a half-dozen times since January 2007. The first of these air raids killed what turned out to be 70 Somali goat herders whom the Pentagon had initially claimed were Islamic fighters, Reuters reported on January 12, 2007.

In May this year, after several other attempts, the bombings finally succeeded in killing the leader of the al-Shabaab militia, Aden Hashi Ayro.

Here too, the strike also demolished the surrounding homes, killing 10 others and leading to anti-US protests throughout the village, according to a May 4 BBC News report.

On the ground, the Ethiopian military captured Mogadishu before New Year's Day, 2007. The most powerful army in the region devastated the organised UIC forces.

But the remaining militants fled and quickly melted back into the larger civilian population.

As predicted, the collapse of the UIC and the subsequent Ethiopian occupation has led to a relentless Iraq-style insurgency — one that has been rapidly gaining strength.

The insurgents have used roadside bombs, hit-and-run attacks, and targeted assassinations against government officials to assault the TFG and its Ethiopian backers.

Increasingly, however, they have been able to rout Ethiopian and TFG military forces in direct confrontation, moving to capture and hold entire swathes of territory for extended periods of time.

Ethiopian and TFG forces, for their part, responded with a ferocious campaign to root out militants in Mogadishu and surrounding areas. The vicious counterinsurgency has seen the regular shelling of densely populated urban neighbourhoods.

Distinction between civilians and insurgents is often irrelevant to the security forces that frequently prey on the Somali population.

Looting, rape, torture, mutilation, and cutting the throats of victims are regular tactics of Ethiopian and TFG forces. A June 1 Amnesty International report recounts episodes too horrific to quote from here.

Thus, Somalis remain caught in the crossfire between Ethiopian and TFG security forces, insurgents, warlords, criminals and, on occasion, US gunships.

The human cost has been staggering. The forces of war and drought are rapidly converging on the Horn of Africa nation in a perfect storm directed against the Somali population.

The civilian death toll since the invasion is fast approaching 10,000, a September 16 Reuters report claimed.

More than a million people have fled their homes, including half of Mogadishu's residents, and are now living in squalid, make-shift refugee camps.

Famine

The global food and fuel crises have combined with the disruption of fighting, looting, inflation, and a failure of the seasonal rains to push Somalia to the absolute brink.

The country now stands on the verge of famine on a scale not seen since the early 1990s, when an estimated 300,000 Somalis starved to death.

Recent UN estimates hold that more than 3.25 million people, nearly half the population, are currently in need of food aid.
International officials have long been calling the situation the most horrific humanitarian disaster on the African continent.

As in Iraq, the "war on terror" in Somalia has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It has sown the increasing radicalisation and anti-Westernisation of an entire population of poor Third World people.

In recent months there has been new evidence for the first time of foreign fighters inside Somalia — decidedly not the case when Frazer declared two weeks prior to Ethiopia's invasion that Somalia was "now controlled by al-Qaeda cell individuals".

While the leadership of the UIC was originally a mix of moderate and conservative Islamic actors, the insurgency no longer maintains this character. A peace agreement between the former moderate elements of the UIC, now called the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia, and the TFG has been already concluded to no effect.

The old UIC leaders no longer control the insurgency. Battle-hardened al-Shabaab militants, perhaps poised to succeed the TFG, espouse a far more radical and anti-Western Islamic ideology.

In September, two Somali men in their early 20s were arrested at a German airport on suspicion of planning terrorist attacks somewhere in the West.

They were released due to insufficient evidence — but German intelligence officials believe the men were arrested too early, according to an October 8 Der Spiegel report.

Somalia has indeed been a third front in the "war on terror".

Almost two years into the occupation, few can still maintain delusions of US success in the Horn of Africa. Much about the affair recalls the disastrous US interventions in the Congo and Angola during the Cold War.

But perhaps most troubling is that the current episode is the creation of the United States Africa Command (Africom) and the larger militarisation of US foreign policy in Africa.

What becomes of Somalia remains to be seen. What is certain is that the US has taken a group of the world's most destitute, desperate, and brutalised people — and brutalised them some more.

We might expect to see many more angry young Somali men bringing violence to the West in the future. Whether we know it or not, we have certainly brought it to them.

This is the Bush administration's legacy and it will be with us for a long time to come.

[This article has been abridged from , Mrzine. Matthew Blood is an independent journalist who has lived and traveled in sub-Saharan Africa. He can be reached at mblood9@gmail.com.

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