Vol. 80/No. 43 November 14, 2016
Washington steps up military intervention in Somalia
Some 300 U.S. special operations troops along with 100 personnel from Washington-based private military contractor Bancroft Global Development are working with the Somali army and an African Union “peacekeeping” force of some 22,000 soldiers from Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and other countries. They are backed by air and drone strikes from the U.S. military base in neighboring Djibouti, Washington’s only permanent base on the African continent.
Over 3,000 U.S. military forces are stationed at the Djibouti base, which is the hub for U.S. drone strikes in Yemen and across the region. The French government has a base in Djibouti as well, with about 1,900 troops, and both China and Japan are building bases there.
U.S. forces in Somalia are involved in more than half a dozen ground raids and drone strikes a month, and help interrogate prisoners afterward, the New York Times reported Oct. 16. “The Pentagon has acknowledged only a small fraction of these operations,” it said. “But even the information released publicly shows a marked increase this year.”
The Barack Obama administration’s course in Somalia, as elsewhere, is to rely on special operations forces and airstrikes in coalition with local allies, rather than large ground forces — a registration of U.S. imperialism’s relative weakening. It contrasts with Washington’s last major intervention in Somalia in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush sent 28,000 troops to occupy the country. That came to a humiliating end the following year after 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in the highly publicized “Black Hawk Down” battle in the capital, Mogadishu.
Somalia has been wracked by war and without a centralized government since the overthrow of the regime of Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. After years of fighting between rival clans that devastated the country, the Union of Islamic Courts in 2006 took control of Mogadishu and much of the southern part of the country. Ethiopian troops, backed by Washington, then invaded and installed an alternative government, but it has never succeeded in bringing the country under its control. Al-Shabab emerged from a split in the Union of Islamic Courts as the strongest force fighting against the invasion and the new government. It has links with al-Qaeda and has also carried out terrorist attacks in neighboring Kenya.
A million people have left Somalia as refugees from the war and another million are internally displaced, out of a population of about 11 million. The northern territories of Somaliland and Puntland have functioned under their own governments since 1991 and are not part of the
civil war.
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