As New Somali President Welcomes US Troops, Analyst Believes the West Is Likely Pulling Strings
01:20 GMT 19.05.2022 (Updated: 09:43 GMT 15.11.2022)
© AP Photo / Tech. Sgt. Christopher Ruano
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US boots on the ground, regional independence, and a sketchy oil deal–what’s behind America’s renewed interest in the Horn of Africa?
Less than 24 hours had passed since Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was announced as the new president of Somalia when US President Joe Biden declared he was sending in troops. They hadn’t been gone long–a little over a year has passed since most of the roughly 700 US Special Operations troops based in Somalia at the end of 2020 were withdrawn as part of former President Trump’s efforts to end America’s “forever wars.”
Now, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council says the US plans to establish “a persistent presence” in Somalia so as to “maximize the safety and effectiveness of [US] forces” there.
Last year, the US and the European Union threatened to sanction Somalia if its parliament moved ahead with plans to extend by two years the term of now ex-President Mohamed Farmaajo, and incoming President Mohamud repeatedly accused him of attempting to carry out a “coup.”
Under the complex clan-based power-sharing agreement currently in place, only members of parliament are permitted to vote for president, so Mohamud is now set to serve his presidential term after reportedly winning just 214 votes in an election closed to the public. One of his first actions since assuming the presidency was to issue a statement on Twitter indicating he “thanks and appreciates” US President Joe Biden “for authorizing the deployment of American troops to #Somalia.”
“The #US,” he went on to claim, “has always been a reliable partner in our quest to stability and fight against terrorism.”
This characterization, however, was heavily disputed by a number of journalists, including Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, who told Sputnik News that “based upon its historical legacy, the [US] government cannot be trusted in its proclamations about assisting African states to fight terrorism.”
The US has a “long and sordid history” in Somalia, he notes, explaining that “what has transpired in regard to US foreign policy in Somalia, Libya, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and other countries can only be characterized as terrorism.”
The recent “restoration of direct US military involvement in Somalia” isn’t actually aimed at stabilizing Africa. In fact, he says, it’s quite the opposite:
“The US plans for Somalia are the same as the rest of Africa. Washington and Wall Street are only interested in seeking political and economic domination over African territories and their resources.”
Somalia remains heavily-divided, with political divisions sometimes boiling over. Last year, firefights reportedly erupted in April between forces representing Farmaajo and opposition figures, including the new president. But the primary source of violence remains a small jihadist militia known as Al-Shabaab. The group, whose supposed threat to US troops was used to justify the recent deployment, has been described by Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley as “an extension of Al-Qaeda*.”
Al-Shabaab “grew out of the Islamic Courts Unions, and a lot of the people who constituted the Islamic Courts at some point did join the federal government structures that were established in Somalia,” according to Azikiwe.
In 2014, a UN monitoring group accused recently-elected President Mohamud’s advisor, Musa Haji Mohamed “Ganjab,” of smuggling weapons to Al-Shabaab. With an estimated strength of 5,000 - 10,000 militants, the group has carried out numerous deadly acts of violence in Somalia and throughout the East African region over the past 15 years and seemingly gotten caught up in a low-intensity proxy war between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates for regional influence.
Although “increasing attacks by jihadist armed groups” have been a serious problem on their own, Azikiwe notes that they “also provides a rationale for continued Pentagon and AMISOM [African Union Mission] and other outside military forces to maintain their forces in Somalia.”
Much like how “Al Qaeda came out of the US struggle against the former socialist-oriented government in Afghanistan during the late ‘70s and the 1980s–and ISIS grew out of the efforts by the US to minimize Iranian influence in Iraq–the US has created these organizations. They’ve utilized them in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, and other countries to carry out US foreign policy. However, at the same time, they can deem them as being terrorists and also use them as a justification for military interventions like they’ve done in Syria and other countries.”
Azikiwe is far from the only observer to see a pattern emerge in the history of the groups which supposedly inspired Al-Shabaab.
Colonel Richard Black, a retired Virginia state senator who’s been an outspoken critic of US foreign policy towards Syria and was reportedly added to a list of ‘official enemies’ published by an ISIS magazine in 2015, told the Schiller Institute in April that the war in Syria “didn’t exist” until the US “sent the CIA to coordinate with Al Qaeda elements.”
“The war began in 2011 when the United States landed Central Intelligence operatives to begin coordinating with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. And we had been unwavering supporters of Al Qaeda since before the war formally began. We are supporters of Al Qaeda today, where they’re bottled up in Idlib province. The CIA supplied them under secret Operation Timber Sycamore. We gave them all of their anti-tank weapons, all of their anti-air-missiles. And Al Qaeda has always been our proxy force on the ground. They, together with ISIS, have carried out the mission of the United States.”
The current National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, indicated a common cause shared between the notorious international terrorist organization Al-Qaeda and the US government in a leaked 2012 email to his then-boss, Hillary Clinton: “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”
Other theories for the uptick in US involvement in Somalia have emerged in the aftermath of Mohamud’s election as well. In April, Somalia’s minister of petroleum and minerals was summoned by the country’s auditor general over a February oil exploration deal with Texas-based Coastline Exploration Ltd, which was immediately dismissed by the president and prime minister as “illegal.”
28 December 2021, 22:14 GMT
The company’s founder rejected suggestions of any dishonest dealings, insisting Coastline’s leaders “don't need to be corrupt”—though they acknowledged they’d paid for Somali regulators’ flights and accommodations when they brought them to Turkey to ink the agreement. But there’s been little movement on the case, and questions remain about who authorized the secretive deal and what role it could have played in behind-the-scenes political negotiations.
While Coastline was the first such project to (briefly) get off the ground in years, Azikiwe says, “US oil companies and even Canadian oil companies have been involved in exploration for Somalian oil for many years. They even, at one point possibly thirty years ago, allocated concessions for the drilling of oil.”
Indeed, as a 1993 Los Angeles Times article noted, “nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron, and Phillips,” who could potentially “reap big rewards… if the US-led military mission [could] restore peace to the impoverished African nation.”
But it’s not just Somalia’s oil that’s of interest to the foreign states who’ve long called the shots in the region. Since 2018, the country’s implementation of a three-way security agreement with neighboring Ethiopia and Eritrea has symbolized a growing regional solidarity that a Soros-funded political commentator claimed was “destabilizing the Horn of Africa.”
The Joint Declaration on Comprehensive Cooperation Between Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea, or “Tripartite Agreement,” as it’s more commonly known, established a framework for state-to-state collaboration, especially in defense, where all three nations have historically faced similar threats from both jihadists and US-backed Tigray separatists. According to Azikiwe, the situation in Somalia is “undoubtedly” related to this emerging cooperation in the Horn of Africa.
“In the Ethiopian situation, the US has taken a pretty firm position against the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and has sided with the TPLF, who have been historic allies of the United States going back at least until the early 1990s. So yeah, any initiative by the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments in any regional conflict in East Africa would undoubtedly be opposed by Washington at this stage.”
Describing the deal in February, noted Eritrean-American political analyst Simon Tesfamariam told Black Agenda Report that “US policymakers will make every effort to shatter the peace,” but “there are now special relationships growing in the Horn of Africa, and it's not just governments–it’s entire peoples.” Whether efforts to destabilize them will succeed remains to be seen.
*A terrorist organization banned in Russia
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Sputnik.
