The US Drone War Continues in Somalia Without a Shred of Accountability

Following the release of the Biden administration’s “new” drone guidelines, US Africa Command is still authorizing airstrikes in the Horn of Africa as often as it pleases

A September 6 airstrike in El-Garas, a town in Somalia’s Galmudug state, caused several civilian casualties and who was responsible for the attack is anyone’s guess.

According to an Associated Press report three days following the incident, a woman and her five grandchildren were killed by a missile targeting a vehicle belonging to Al-Shabaab as it was passing by their home.

“It was an American airstrike,” Abdifatah Ali Halane, secretary-general of the El-Garas administration, told the AP. According to this official, the strike killed just three individuals, including two suspected members of Al-Shabaab, while injuring four children.   

While US officials have acknowledged the reported casualties, they’ve denied the involvement of American forces and insist that the operation had been conducted by Somalia’s military.

“The claim being spread by al-Shabab that U.S. forces caused the unfortunate harm to civilians is false,” a statement from the US military said.  

This claim was echoed by Somalia’s deputy information minister, Abdirahman Adala, who’d indicated that three, not two, members of the terror group had been killed. According to this official, the civilians who’d been killed had died as the result of explosive materials placed in a nearby home by “extremists.”

Someone is lying.

It’s of course possible that the US government could be telling the truth with regards to this one isolated incident. However, given their well-documented, demonstrable history of deception about the Pentagon’s drone wars, the public has absolutely no reason to believe a word these officials say.

As always, the American people are in the dark about what their government is doing overseas. This latest report follows several others just like it that have emanated from the region in recent months.

US Africa Command (AFRICOM) conducted what it called “a collective self-defense airstrike against al Shabaab terrorists” near Seiera, Somalia, on August 26. A press release issued by AFRICOM the following day noted that the US government’s “initial assessment is that the airstrike killed 13 al Shabaab fighters and that no civilians were injured or killed.”

The strike – ordered in support of Somali National Army forces – comes less than two weeks following another US airstrike which killed five “al Shabaab terrorists” approximately 250 miles northeast of Mogadishu. The Pentagon followed that attack with an announcement that used nearly identical language, assuring Americans that only militants associated with the terror group were killed. These declarations have yet to be verified and have been issued by a government that’s been undercounting civilian casualties since the War on Terror began.

As this publication previously reported, this is how CNN’s Natasha Bertrand chose to relay the news of the August 15 strike, opting to simply rewrite AFRICOM’s press release, as opposed to exhibiting even an ounce of skepticism about the government’s claims.

The operation that followed received even less attention. This is far from surprising, given the quantity and quality of the reporting on Somalia by the US media over the years.

In one of his last acts as president, Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of most US troops from Somalia in December 2020.

Naturally, the pretend-left corporate media opted for a subtle attack from the right, with CNN reminding its readers that the “directive on Somalia comes a week after the Pentagon inspector general [said] that the terrorist threat in East Africa is not degraded and that Somali forces are not able to confront the threat without US support.”

That same report also quoted Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley who noted that “we recognize that Al-Shabaab in the lower Jubba River Valley is a threat. We know that it is an organized, capable terrorist organization, it is an extension of Al Qaeda just like ISIS was, that they do have some reach and they could if left unattended, conduct operations against not only US interests in the region but also against the homeland.”

CNN didn’t offer its readers any context about who this group is or how it materialized in the region. It also didn’t push back on the well-worn scare tactic of framing all of the Pentagon’s foreign military actions as being crucial to homeland security.

It is also important to note that this is one of the many things the pro-Trump crowd uses to paint their leader as a “peace” president who, according to them, was committed to confronting and disrupting the military-industrial complex’s global ambitions. Somalia is an excellent example of this absolutely false narrative.  

For starters, Trump launched 196 airstrikes within Somalia during his presidency. He also maintained a US troop presence in the country, and only reversed course after the election results were finished rolling in.

When Trump announced that he was pulling US forces from Mogadishu, some observed that his objective was to make Biden’s adjustment in office as difficult as possible, whatever that means. Perhaps just getting the credit for downsizing America’s military footprint overseas [without actually doing so] was his purpose for the withdrawal. His reasoning and motives are completely irrelevant. What was happening in Trump’s head when he made the call is far less important than the reality of what his “withdrawal” actually entailed.

What actually matters is that he kept a sizeable US force in the country until it came time to begin packing up the White House Residence and concluded the withdrawal just three days before Joe Biden was sworn in.

As president, Trump spoke constantly about bringing America’s “forever wars” to an end and about bringing our troops home, but the rhetoric he favored rarely matched the actions he implemented.

Most of the soldiers he extracted from Somalia didn’t leave Africa but were simply moved to countries such as Kenya and Djibouti. As a Pentagon statement at the time noted, many of the troops departing the country would be “repositioned from Somalia into neighboring countries in order to allow cross-border operations by both US and partner forces to maintain pressure against violent extremist organizations operating in Somalia.”

“The US will retain the capability to conduct targeted counterterrorism operations in Somalia and collect early warnings and indicators regarding threats to the homeland,” this statement also said.

The US government would retain the right to launch airstrikes within Somalia’s borders, but the bombs would originate from a few hundred miles further away.

This was essentially all Trump’s last-minute decision accomplished. The following year, this risk-free, largely meaningless exercise was reversed by the new commander-in-chief when President Biden announced that he was deploying up to 500 US troops back to Somalia to assist the government in Mogadishu in its fight against Al-Shabaab. But is defeating this terror group really the US government’s purpose in committing its resources to this part of the world?

As it always has, the security state has sold its involvement to the American public in the simplest, most digestible terms imaginable in the hopes that very few people will question its stated motives.

According to most of the commentary that’s provided by our leaders, there are bad guys in Somalia and they’re really, really bad. This is usually the extent of the analysis. No explanation of the historical forces that contributed to the group’s rise in the region is ever provided, but everyone in the West is nevertheless assured that the US government has selflessly volunteered to come to the rescue.    

In actuality, America is using a mess it helped create as a pretext to intervene in a part of the world it deems strategically valuable. As is true with just about every other nation in the region, US involvement in Somalia stretches back decades.

Mohammed Siad Barre first came to power in 1969 following the coup that killed Abdirashid Sharmarke, the president of the Somali Republic. The government just next door was also changing. After a violent coup in 1974, Ethiopia established a Marxist-Leninist state.

A significant shift in regional allegiance took place shortly thereafter.   

In 1977, Barre’s military invaded the disputed Ogaden area of southeastern Ethiopia. This angered Moscow, who’d been angling to form a union of socialist states in the region. The Soviet Union threw its support behind Ethiopia, and the Somali army was pushed back and defeated.

Following Ethiopia’s alignment with Moscow, Barre denounced the Russians and turned to the US. He expelled Soviet officials from Somalia and pledged his allegiance to Washington. Barre executed dozens of high-level Somali military officers following the war’s conclusion, leading to a coup attempt in 1978.

The aftermath of the failed takeover saw Barre’s government target the Majeerteen clan, the Somali faction primarily responsible for trying to remove his regime from power. Some 2,000 Majeerteen died as a result.

When the economy deteriorated in the 80s, Barre met protest against his government with even more violence, with widespread jailing and torturing of political opponents, particularly members of the Isaaq clan, becoming a staple of his regime.

In 1990, the Africa Watch Committee released an extensive report titled "Somalia: A Government at War with Its Own People,” documenting the human rights abuses taking place in the country. In it, the organization described the summary killings, arbitrary arrest, torture, and rape of the people in this area as "state sponsored terrorism," estimating that 50,000 to 60,000 people were killed from 1988 to 1989.

Nevertheless, the Somali government continued to be supported by the US. A mutually beneficial relationship between the two nations saw Somalia receive some $100 million in annual military and economic aid from Washington in the 80s, while the Americans were granted access to the port of Berbera on the Gulf of Aden.

The disintegration of Barre’s government came shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, something that can hardly be described as a coincidence.

“Obviously, the United States had been well aware of what Siad Barre was doing beforehand, but they chose to turn a blind eye to it because they wanted to use him as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. Now that the Soviet Union was no longer there, the United States began decrying human rights abuses and suspended economic and military aid,” Elizabeth Schmidt, a professor emeritus at Loyola University Maryland, noted during a November 2022 interview with Jacobin. “Without the massive US support that he had been getting since the late 1970s, Siad Barre was an easy target.”

After Barre was overthrown in 1991, Somalia experienced a devastating civil war. In the wake of the government’s collapse, it was the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) that restored basic public services for the population.

In 2006, the US backed Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia, overthrowing the ICU, and occupying the country until 2009. Just as US-led intervention did in Iraq, this latest conflict would also spur a domestic insurgency; in this instance, it was led by Al-Shabaab, a militia group whose intention was to protect the ICU from the foreign invaders. As the Ethiopian occupation continued, Al-Shabaab grew more and more violent.  

By 2007, the group gained control of a substantial portion of the country, resulting in further intervention by the UN and the African Union. US forces began training Somali and African Union soldiers and launched airstrikes targeting the leadership of Al-Shabaab.

Today, Al-Shabaab routinely launches attacks against the US-backed Somali government as well as targets in neighboring countries that sent in troops to intervene in Somalia’s affairs. In essence, the US is now intervening to resolve a problem that wouldn’t exist without its decades of involvement in Somalia in the first place. More importantly, this is intervention that serves the US government’s interests, not Somalia’s.

At the heart of America’s decades-long concentration on Somalia is geography. On the country’s northern coast sits the Gulf of Aden, which leads to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, one of the most crucial waterways on earth. Through this extremely narrow chokepoint moves all of the maritime traffic traveling between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. If use of this passageway were to be discontinued, vessels transporting goods and oil between US/European and Asian markets would be required to travel around the African continent.  

Washington desperately wants to continue to control this part of the world. For this reason, it is no surprise that AFRICOM’s most important location is situated right at the doorstep of this critical corridor, on Djibouti’s coast, just a few miles from the Strait.  

This location, Camp Lemonnier, is just one of the more than 900 foreign military bases in the US government’s global portfolio. The one and only foreign base being operated by the Chinese is also in Djibouti and sits just 10 miles from Camp Lemonnier.

As the Pentagon continues its deadly shadow war in the region, it’s important to remember that US officials may talk a big game about fighting terrorism and “protecting the homeland,” but their true objectives are always far more complicated.