US warship involved in Somali operations

So how on earth does one minimize civilian casualties while bombarding a small village from offshore? Sometimes one wonders if the US wants to encourage militants so that the military-neo-con-industrial can continue to justify the huge expenditures of the war on terror. Someone once said that US actions are the best recruitment programme that Al Qaeda could wish for.

8 Foreign Islamic Militants Killed in Fighting With Somali Officials After U.S. Strike
Saturday , June 02, 2007



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MOGADISHU, Somalia —

Eight foreign Islamic militants were killed during fighting with Somali government forces at a remote, mountainous northeastern Somali village, the vice president of the region said Saturday.

At least one U.S. warship late Friday pounded the village after the government forces clashed with the militants. Government forces in the semiautonomous northeastern region of Puntland are pursuing another five foreign Islamic militants, Vice President Hassan Dahir Mohamoud told The Associated Press.

At least one U.S. warship bombarded a remote, mountainous village in Somalia where Islamic militants had set up a base, officials said in the northern region of Puntland.

The attack from a U.S. destroyer took place late Friday, said Muse Gelle, the regional governor. The extremists had arrived Wednesday by speedboat at the port town of Bargal.

Gelle said the area is a dense thicket, making it difficult for security forces from the semiautonomous republic of Puntland to intervene on its own.

A local radio station quoted Puntland's leader, Ade Muse, as saying that his forces had battled with the extremists for hours before the U.S. ships arrived and used their cannons. Muse said five of his troops were wounded, but that he had no information about casualties among the extremists.

A task force of coalition ships, called CTF-150, is permanently based in the northern Indian Ocean and patrols the Somali coast in hopes of intercepting international terrorists. U.S. destroyers are normally assigned to the task force and patrol in pairs.

At an international conference in Singapore, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters who asked on Saturday about the Somalia reports, "Frankly, I don't know exactly what was going on. I've been on the road. And I wouldn't be commenting on operational activities anyway."

CNN International, quoting a Pentagon official, also reported the U.S. warship's involvement.

A Pentagon spokesman told The Associated Press he had no information about the incident.

"This is a global war on terror and the U.S. remains committed to reducing terrorist capabilities when and where we find them," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

"We recognize the importance of working closely with allies to seek out, identify, locate, capture, and if necessary, kill terrorists and those who would provide them safe haven," Whitman said. "The very nature of some of our operations, as well as the success of those operations is often predicated on our ability to work quietly with our partners and allies."

Puntland's minister of information, Mohamed Abdulrahman Banga, told the AP that the extremists arrived heavily armed in two fishing boats from southern Somalia, which they controlled for six months last year before being routed by Ethiopian troops sent to prop up a faltering Somali government.

"They had their own small boats and guns. We do not know exactly where they came from — maybe from Ras Kamboni, where they were cornered in January," he said.

Local fishermen, contacted by telephone, said about a dozen fighters arrived Wednesday, but Puntland officials said the number could be as high as 35.

The United States has repeatedly accused Somalia's Council of Islamic Courts of harboring international terrorists linked to Al Qaeda and allegedly responsible for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The U.S. sent a small number of special operations troops with the Ethiopian forces that drove the Islamic forces into hiding. U.S. warplanes have carried out at least two airstrikes in an attempt to kill suspected Al Qaeda members, Pentagon officials have said.

In Mogadishu, unknown gunmen killed a government official, Hassan Ali Sa'id, in the capital's southern neighborhood late Saturday as he was about to enter his house, a neighbor said. Sa'id was district commissioner of the Howlwadaag area.

"We heard two shots and we came out and we saw our neighbor lying in the street and a car disappearing," said Sa'id Ahmed Yonis.

Sa'id is the second district commissioner killed in Mogadishu in the past month

Another US air strike in Somalia?

Interesting the Somali government is not aware of any attacks. Probably the US would not bother to clear it with the Somali govt. The US seems to be grooming a moderate Islamist to help bring Islamist supporters into the interim government and make the new government more secure and pliant to US influence no doubt. It remains to be seen whether this can work. Given the past failures of US policy in the area success seems improbable.


U.S. launches new air strike on Somalia -report
24 Jan 2007 10:09:35 GMT

By Sahal Abdulle

MOGADISHU, Jan 24 (Reuters) - A U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship has launched a second air strike against suspected al Qaeda operatives in southern Somalia, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing unidentified U.S. officials.

No confirmation of Monday's reported attack was immediately available in the region and a Pentagon spokesman declined to comment. The newspaper said there was no information on the results or the specific targets of the strike.

An AC-130 gunship two weeks ago attacked what Washington said were al Qaeda agents fleeing with Islamist forces defeated by Somali government and Ethiopian troops late last month. It was the first overt U.S. action in Somalia since the end of a disastrous peacekeeping mission in 1994.

Somali government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari said he was not aware of a second U.S. attack.

Washington believes Somali Islamists harboured al Qaeda members accused of bombing two U.S. embassies and an Israeli-owned hotel in east Africa.

Any prolonged U.S. intervention in Somalia would be sure to inflame political passions there, joining the chorus of Muslims who see the "war on terror" as a crusade against Islam.

A freelance Somali journalist said on Sunday he had seen U.S. troops on the ground in south Somalia working with Ethiopian forces hunting fugitive Islamists. Ethiopia vehemently denied the report.

Rumours have swirled for days that U.S. personnel were inside Somalia since the Jan. 8 strike but there has been no official confirmation of a U.S. ground presence.

Mortars were fired at Mogadishu airport on Wednesday, killing one person and injuring another after a U.N. delegation arrived in the Somali capital, a government source said.

"A U.N. delegation just arrived and as soon as they left the plane, two mortar shells hit the airport," the source said.

"One person was killed while another was injured," the source said, adding the victims were Somalis. The U.N. Development Programme delegation was taken to an agency compound.

A spate of attacks, mainly against Ethiopian troops backing Somalia's interim government, have rocked the capital since they helped oust Islamists from Mogadishu and much of the south they had controlled for six months in a lightning December offensive.

The Islamists and some foreign supporters have vowed to wage guerrilla war against Ethiopian troops in the country, and many Somalis suspect their militants have been behind the attacks.

"THERE WILL BE NO VACUUM"

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said on Wednesday some 200 soldiers had withdrawn from the chaotic nation.

"We have organised that the last phase of withdrawal will coincide with deployment of AU forces," Meles told a news conference in Addis Ababa. "There will be no vacuum."

The African Union (AU) has approved a nearly 8,000-strong peacekeeping force for Somalia, but experts doubt its capacity to muster it, let alone tame a nation in anarchy since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

The Islamists have been pushed into the remote southern tip near Kenya's border and Nairobi has in custody top Islamist leader Sheikh Sharif Ahmed.

A Kenyan government official said on Wednesday Ahmed would not be deported to Somalia because he would be killed and that he has asked for refuge in Yemen.

Yemen's foreign minister was quoted as saying this month that some Islamist leaders had arrived there.

"We won't send him back. He will be killed," the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.

"(Prime Minister Ali Mohamed) Gedi is in town and we are trying to persuade him to talk to Sheikh Sharif, but he won't. He (Ahmed) wants to go to Yemen."

Dinari declined to comment on the fate of Islamists returned to Somalia.

Considered a moderate before the war, Ahmed is among those the United States sees as a potential force in reconciliation.

The Kenyan official said Ahmed was under the watch of Kenya's National Security Intelligence Service at a plush hotel in Nairobi's outskirts.

Many diplomats suspect a Kenyan and U.S. hand in bringing Ahmed in.

At least one Western diplomat dismissed as false reports that he turned himself in at the Kenyan border on Sunday: "He's been in the shade in Nairobi for at least a week and they have just been figuring out how to handle it."

A European diplomat said Ahmed had been in the country since at least Jan. 16.

The U.S. embassy in Kenya said Ambassador to Kenya Michael Ranneberger planned to meet Ahmed later this week. (Additional reporting by Bryson Hull and Marie-Louise Gumuchian in Nairobi and Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa)

Backkground on Oil in Somalia

Of course the main attack in Somalia was by Ethiopians not the US. They are acting as proxies for the US who have experienced enough problems with attacking Somalia. There will need to be more security in Somalia before there will be much more foreign investment.


Oil, Not Terrorists, the Reason for US Attack on Somalia

Monday, 22 January 2007
By Wanjohi Kabukuru

01/22/07 "ICHBlog" -- -- Just why did the US attack Somalia two weeks ago? Of course, the answer given for the US military intervention and the generally accepted notion is the hunt for terrorists. But is it? Are terrorists the only bone of contention the US has with Somalia? When the US military devised “Operation Restore Hope” in 1993 which was short-lived after they were whipsawed by rag-tag militia in and around Mogadishu, were they fighting the ‘war on terror’?

They couldn’t have been because this war was to start much later, If anything it is a post-Sept 11 phenomenon. So then why did the US bomb ICU extremists in the name of Al Qaeda terrorists and not throughout last year when they occupied Mogadishu?

Just why is Somalia so important to the US, and by extension the big boys of Europe and some Gulf states? A UN Somalia Monitoring Group report released in November 2005 reveals that a dozen countries, namely Yemen, Djibouti, Libya, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Iran, Syria, Eritrea, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Uganda were all poking their noses into the Somalia pie.

What the UN Somalia Monitoring Group didn’t reveal, however, is that these were not the only countries which were interested in the country. The little known yet well-heeled contact group, consisting of Norway, the US, UK, France and Tanzania (just an appendage) are also deeply enmeshed in Somalia.

While the terrorism theory holds some water, the reality of the factors contributing to the mess in Somalia is pegged on natural resources. Oil and gas are Somalia’s Achilles heel. It is an open secret that four US oil giants are sitting pretty on money-spinning concessions expecting to reap huge windfalls from massive resources of both oil and gas in Somalia.

The story of Somalia and oil goes back to the colonial period. British and Italian geologists first identified oil deposits during that period of imperialism. The first oil wells historically referred to as the Daga Shabell series were dug in the 1960s. Tiny gas discoveries adjacent to Socotra were also noted.

The race for these precious natural resources took a new turn in 1988, when the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank, with the support of the governments of Britain, France and Canada and backed by several Western oil companies financed a regional hydrocarbon study of the countries bordering the Red Sea and the Gulf of Eden.

The countries were Somalia, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia was later dropped, but not before it had been established that within the study area, massive deposits of oil and gas existed. The results of the findings were presented to a three-day American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Eastern Hemisphere group conference, in London in September, 1991. Is there oil in Somalia? Listen to the answer:

“It’s there. There’s no doubt there’s oil there,” said geologist Thomas E. O’Connor, the World Bank’s principal petroleum engineer, who steered the in-depth, three-year study of oil prospects in Somalia’s Gulf of Eden in the northern coastal region.

The study was intended to encourage private investment in the petroleum potential of eight African nations. The conclusions of their findings are quite telling as the geologists put Somalia and Sudan at the top of the list of prospective commercial oil producers.

While presenting their results during the conference, two geologists involved in the study (an American and an Egyptian) reported that the investigation of nine exploratory wells dug in Somalia pointed out that the region was “situated within the oil window, and thus (is) highly prospective for gas and oil.”

Geologist, Z. R. Beydoun, who was involved in the survey, noted that “the geological parameters conducive to the generation, expulsion and trapping of significant amounts of oil and gas” were within the offshore sites. Soon after a race for lucrative deals kicked off in earnest.

Four US oil companies, namely Conoco, Chevron, Amoco and Philips have concessions in nearly two thirds of Somalia. This quartet of oil conglomerates was granted these contracts in the final days of Somalia’s deposed dictator, Siad Barre. The US first military engagement in Somalia was fully supported by Conoco.

About the Author: Mr Kabukuru is a Nairobi-based freelance journalist.

This article first appeared in the Daily Nation

Rogue State America

While this article makes many good points it has several serious errors.

The Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was to protect the international recognised Somali government. It is true that it was a government mostly in name since it controlled just one city and its environs. It was also more or less a creature of international forces and supported by the US. But the Islamic COurts were not recognised by any country at the time. Even the US air attack had the approval of the Somali government.
The remarks about Afghanistan are even more misleading. There was no attack at all by the Taliban on the US. The Taliban did support Al Qaeda and allowed terror training camps in the country. However, this hardly justifies an invasion and overthrowing the government. THe invasion by a US led force helped the Northern Alliance of brutal warlords overthrow the Taliban regime. It was never justified by any UN resolution. It was clearly against international law. The subsequent UN authorisation of ISAF in no way changes that any more than the UN authorisation of the US led invasion of Iraq makes the IRaq invasion any less illegal.


Rogue State America

By John B. Judis

01/19/07 "TNR" -- -- What exactly are we doing in the Horn of Africa, where we have encouraged the Christian government of Ethiopia to invade Somalia and replace its Islamic government? As far as I can tell, we have violated international law, committed war crimes, helped Al Qaeda recruit new members, and involved ourselves in a guerrilla war that could last decades. It's Iraq writ small. And it can't be blamed on Donald Rumsfeld.

There's an old principle of international law, going back to the seventeenth century, against one nation violating the sovereignty of another. It was often breached, but, after two world wars, it was enshrined in the United Nations charter. We criticized the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and justified the first Gulf war on these grounds. The purpose of this principle has been to prevent wars that could arise if more powerful countries simply took it into their hands to dominate smaller, less powerful ones.

Of course, when one nation attacks another, the other can respond. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the overthrow of the Taliban regime, was justified on those grounds. The Taliban weren't simply sheltering Al Qaeda; they were in league with them and had become dependent upon them. To justify its invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration invented an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein's regime. It was pure artifice--remember the drones bearing nuclear weapons headed for our shores--but the very fact that the Bush administration felt it had to resort to deception meant that it understood that a certain principle of international relations was at stake.

But, last month, the Bush administration actively supported Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia. It provided money, advisers, and, finally, U.S. warplanes. And there was no justification for Ethiopia's invasion. It was a clear violation of the U.N. charter. The neighboring people have been feuding for centuries, but Ethiopia's Christian government could not cite a significant provocation for its attack on the Muslim country and its Islamic government. If anything, Ethiopia's invasion closely resembled Iraq's invasion in August 1990 of Kuwait. But, instead of criticizing the Ethiopians, the United States applauded and aided them.

The administration claimed that, in supporting Ethiopia, it was fighting the ubiquitous "war on terrorism." According to The New York Times, administration officials even held out the Ethiopia invasion as a model of how it would prosecute the war on terrorism by proxy. By this account, Somalia was Afghanistan, and its Islamic Courts Union government was the Taliban. But the analogy does not hold up. The United States claimed that the Islamic Courts government, which took power last summer, was harboring three Al Qaeda fugitives. But the Al Qaeda members had been in Somalia well before the Islamic Courts took power. They were not part of the government. And Al Qaeda itself did not have training camps in Somalia. Somalia was less like Afghanistan than Pakistan, which, according to outgoing National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, is also home to Al Qaeda members.

In the wake of the Ethiopian invasion, the administration made a stronger claim. On December 14, Jendayi Frazer, the State Department official for Africa, said, "The Council of Islamic Courts is now controlled by Al Qaeda cell individuals--East Africa Al Qaeda cell individuals." But Frazer didn't name any individuals. And intelligence analysts have questioned her claim, which, according to The Washington Post, was "[b]ased in part on intelligence out of Ethiopia." As Matthew Yglesias put it, "In other words, we're backing Ethiopia's war against Somalia because intelligence provided by the Ethiopian government suggests we should back Ethiopia."

The Bush administration often claims that it is encouraging democracy, but the invasion itself probably represents a net loss of freedom--and that's a hard calculation to make among these governments. The U.S.-backed Ethiopian government of Meles Zenawi has been widely accused of human rights violations. After the Ethiopian opposition protested that the 2005 election was rigged, the Meles government killed 193 demonstrators and arrested about 80,000 others to quell the protests. Teshale Aberra, the president of the Supreme Court in Ethiopia's largest province who defected to Great Britain last fall, said, "There is massive killing all over. There is a systematic massacre." Meanwhile, in Somalia, the Islamic Courts replaced a weak transitional regime that was unable to control the warlords, who, since 1991, have turned the countryside into a Hobbesian jungle. The new government had brought a harsh Islamic justice and order to Somalia, which, for all its own injustice, was preferable to the chaos that had prevailed.

With the ouster of the Islamic Courts, the warlords are likely to return to power. Somalia will probably be plunged into another guerrilla war, as the Islamists try to retake power. And the United States will once again ally with these warlords and with a weak, corrupt regime. (According to Jonathan S. Landay and Shashank Bengali, the United States was actually paying off the aide to the militia leader responsible for killing 18 Americans in 1993 in the famous Black Hawk Down incident.) And who will benefit from American intervention? Al Qaeda, which will be able to draw up another recruiting poster from the American-sponsored invasion of a Muslim country. Al Qaeda will be able to point, in particular, to U.S. airstrikes that claimed to target Al Qaeda but instead killed scores of innocent civilians.

That's what happened on January 7 and 8 in Somali border towns; the United States claimed its bombs were intended to kill an Al Qaeda operative supposedly connected to the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But he was not among the victims; nor were other Al Qaeda members. Then reports began trickling in of civilian deaths from the AC-130 gunships that the United States supposedly sent to hunt down the single terrorist. According to Oxfam, the dead included 70 nomads who were searching for water sources. The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, estimated that 100 were wounded in an attack on Ras Kamboni, a fishing village near the Kenyan border. The Economist, which is not an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, wrote, "The Americans used the AC-130, a behemoth designed to shred large areas instantly, in the knowledge that the killing fields would be cleared before journalists and aid workers could reach them." It's a war crime to kill civilians indiscriminately.

In the 1990s, foreign policy experts, eager to identify a new enemy, hit upon the concept of a "rogue state." A rogue state operated outside the bounds of international norms and had to be restrained. The obvious candidates at the time were Libya, Iraq, and North Korea. But the Bush administration has turned the United States itself into a rogue state. Tough-minded conservatives, flexing their "muscular" inclinations from comfortable sinecures in Washington, may dismiss concerns about international law and war crimes as inventions of silly panty-waist liberals. But these inventions, which, in the modern era, were championed by Theodore Roosevelt, were meant to protect Americans as well as other peoples from the wars and the inhumanity that prevailed for thousands of years. We ignore them at their peril, whether in Haditha or Ras Kamboni.

John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Visit The New Republic Website http://www.tnr.com/

Destabilizing the Horn

The US seems to suffer from the vice of hubris. They believe that their gargantuan military machine can impose peace and order by force anywhere in the world. This hubris continues in spite of the disastrous results of their intervention in Iraq and continuing problems in Afghanistan. What will it take for US policy to change. Even though it may provide profits for arms manufacturers and a few elite capitalists with ties to the White House surely the vast masses of the US people will not suffer these disasters forever, especially if the economy begins to falter.



Destabilizing The HornBy Salim Lone 0108/07 "Information Clearing House" --- - The stability that emerged in southern Somalia after sixteen years of utter lawlessness is gone, the defeat of the ruling Islamic Courts Union now ushering in looting, martial law and the prospect of another major anti-Western insurgency. Clan warlords, who terrorized Somalia until they were driven out by the Islamists, and who were put back in power by the U.S.-backed and -trained Ethiopian army, have begun carving up the country once again.With these developments, the Bush administration, undeterred by the horrors and setbacks in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, has opened another battlefront in this volatile quarter of the Muslim world. As with Iraq, it casts this illegal war as a way to curtail terrorism, but its real goal appears to be to obtain a direct foothold in a highly strategic area of the world through a client regime. The results could destabilize the whole region.The Horn of Africa, at whose core Somalia lies, is newly oil-rich. It is also just miles across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, overlooking the daily passage of large numbers of oil tankers and warships through that waterway. The United States has a huge military base in neighboring Djibouti that is being enlarged substantially and will become the headquarters of a new U.S. military command being created specifically for Africa. As evidence of the area's importance, Gen. John Abizaid, the military commander of the region, visited Ethiopia recently to discuss Somalia, while Chinese President Hu Jintao visited Horn countries a few months ago in search of oil and trade agreements.The current series of events began with the rise of the Islamic Courts more than a year ago. The Islamists avoided large-scale violence in defeating the warlords, who had held sway in Somalia ever since they drove out U.N. peacekeepers by killing eighteen American soldiers in 1993, by rallying people to their side through establishing law and order. Washington was wary, fearing their possible support for terrorists. While they have denied any such intentions, some Islamists do have terrorist ties, but these have been vastly overstated in the West.Washington, however, chose to view the situation only through the prism of its "war on terror." The Bush administration supported the warlords—in violation of a U.N. arms embargo it helped impose on Somalia many years ago—indirectly funneling them arms and suitcases filled with dollars.Many of these warlords were part of the Western-supported transitional "government" that had been organized in Kenya in 2004. But the "government" was so devoid of internal support that even after two years it was unable to move beyond the small western town of Baidoa, where it had settled. In the end, it was forced to turn to Somalia's archenemy Ethiopia for assistance in holding on even to Baidoa. Again in violation of the U.N. arms embargo, Ethiopia sent 15,000 troops to Somalia. Their arrival eroded whatever domestic credibility the government might have had.The United States, whose troops have been sighted by Kenyan journalists in the region bordering Somalia, next turned to the U.N. Security Council. In another craven act resembling its post-facto legalization of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Council bowed to U.S. pressure and authorized a regional peacekeeping force to enter Somalia to protect the government and "restore peace and stability." This despite the fact that the U.N. has no right under its charter to intervene on behalf of one of the parties struggling for political supremacy, and that peace and stability had already been restored by the Islamists.The war came soon after the U.N. resolution, its outcome a foregone conclusion thanks to the highly trained and war-seasoned Ethiopian army. The African Union called for the Ethiopians to end the invasion, but the U.N. Security Council made no such call. Ban Ki-moon, the incoming secretary-general, is being urged to treat the enormously complex situation in Darfur as his political challenge, but Somalia, while less complex, is more immediate. He has an opportunity to establish his credentials as an unbiased upholder of the U.N. Charter by seeking Ethiopia's withdrawal.The Ethiopian military presence in Somalia is inflammatory and will destabilize this region and threaten Kenya, a U.S. ally and the only island of stability in this corner of Africa. Ethiopia is at even greater risk, as a dictatorship with little popular support and beset by two large internal revolts by Ogadenis and Oromos. It is also mired in a military stalemate with Eritrea, which has denied it secure access to seaports. It now seeks such access in Somalia.The best antidote to terrorism in Somalia is stability. Instead of engaging with the Islamists to secure peace, the United States has plunged a poor country into greater misery in its misguided determination to dominate the world.