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    In Somalia, the US is bombing the very "terrorists" it created 📂 Archived Message

    Posted by sashimi on August 13, 2021, 10:18 am

    Tim Coles, 13 August 2021

    Lede: US and British meddling transformed Somalia's al-Shabaab into an extremist
    group, inflaming the humanitarian crisis that persists throughout the country.

    (quote)
    This July, the Biden administration picked up where Trump left off and began
    bombing Somalia, a country with a gross domestic product of less than $6bn and a
    poverty rate of 70 percent. But why?

    The official reason provided by the Pentagon was that the Somali National Army
    needed air support in its operations to counter al-Shabaab. But the actual
    reason was that Somalia is geo-strategically important to US empire.

    Successive US administrations have cycled through a myriad of excuses to either
    bomb the country or to arm its dictators: Cold War politics, "humanitarian
    intervention," anti-piracy, and more recently counterterrorism.

    As we shall see, in the mid-2000s, a fragile coalition of soft and hard
    Islamists - explicitly not allied to al-Qaeda at the time - brought some measure
    of peace to the areas of Somalia it controlled. With help from Britain and
    neighboring Ethiopia, the US smashed the coalition and pushed more right-wing
    elements like al-Shabaab over the edge into militancy. And of course, the global
    superpower bombing one of the poorest countries on Earth in the name of national
    security is not terrorism.

    Let's take a look at the broader context and specific chronology.

    US imperial bulwark is born in Africa
    The Pentagon has divided the world into self-appointed Areas of Responsibility
    (AORs). The Southern Command deems itself "responsible" for operations in
    Central and South America, regardless of what the people of the region
    think. The Central Command (CENTCOM) covers much of the Middle East and Central
    Asia: the key intersections of energy fields and pipelines that enable the US to
    influence the global economy at the expense of competitors, notably Russia and
    China.

    The Africa Command (AFRICOM) was founded in 2007 by the George W. Bush
    administration and is based in Stuttgart, Germany. President Barack Obama vastly
    expanded its operations. AFRICOM's current AOR covers 53 of the continent's 54
    states, with Egypt in the northeast already under the AOR of CENTCOM due to its
    strategic value (more below).

    AFRICOM recently bragged about how it helped coordinate with Somali "partners,"
    meaning elements of the regime imposed on the country by the West, to organize
    the Biden-led bombing of al-Shabaab.

    AFRICOM says: "The command's initial assessment is that no civilians were
    injured or killed given the remote nature of where this engagement occurred."

    But who knows? US commanders operating in the African theater have tended to
    dismiss the notion that civilian deaths should be tallied at all. In 1995, for
    example, the US wound down its "assistance" to the UN mission in Somalia, but
    ended up in a shooting war in which several Somalis died. The US Commander,
    Lt. Gen. Anthony Zinni, said at the time: "I'm not counting bodies... I'm not
    interested."

    Somalia's geopolitical importance to US empire
    In the Africa-Middle East regions, three seas are of strategic importance to the
    big powers: the Mediterranean, the Red Sea (connected by Egypt's Suez Canal),
    and the Gulf of Aden, which is shared by Somalia in Africa and Yemen in the
    Middle East. Through these seas and routes travel the shipping containers of the
    world, carrying oil, gas, and consumer products. They are essential for the
    strategic deployment of troops and naval destroyers.

    Somalia was occupied by Britain and Italy during the "Scramble for Africa": the
    continent-wide resource-grab by Western colonial powers that began in the
    late-19. Ethiopia continues to occupy Somalia's Ogaden region. A 1950s' British
    Colonial Office report described the Gulf of Aden as "an important base from
    which naval, military and air forces can protect British interests in the
    Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula": "British" interests, like "US"
    interests today, means elite interests.

    A George W. Bush-era report by the US Army War College notes that, "Even before
    the Suez Canal came into being, the [Red] Sea had been of importance as an
    international waterway. It served as a bridge between the richest areas of
    Europe and the Far East." The report emphasizes that the "geopolitical position
    of the Red Sea is of a special importance."

    AFRICOM was founded with a grand imperial ambition: to make the four of the five
    countries on Africa's Red Sea coast - Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan -
    comply with US elite interests, and to keep the Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Suez
    Canal open for business and strategic deployment.

    As noted before, CENTCOM covers Egypt. During the Arab Spring a decade ago, US
    strategists feared, like their British predecessors, that losing the Suez Canal
    to a democratic government in Egypt "would damage U.S. capabilities to mobilize
    forces to contain Iran and would weaken the overall U.S. defense strategy in the
    Middle East," home of much of the world's accessible oil.
    (/quote)
    -- https://thegrayzone.com/2021/08/13/in-somalia-the-us-is-bombing-the-very-terrorists-it-created/

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