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US Interventions in Somalia: A Chequered History

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Agence France Presse
January 9, 2007

The United States, which this week carried out an air strike on suspected Islamists in Somalia, has intervened several times in the Horn of Africa state, with more failures than successes.


The biggest setback to date began in December 1992, when the US commanded a UN-approved multinational force that aimed to help famine victims and end a vicious conflict between rival warlords. Operation Restore Hope, as the intervention was called, involved a total force of 38,000 troops, of whom 28,000 were American. The US, which in earlier decades had been involved in superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union in the region, was at the time eager to show that it could use its forces for humanitarian purposes. The massive US-led intervention that expelled Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces from Kuwait had ended only a few months earlier.

Restore Hope was followed up, in May 1993, by a United Nations-led operation that still included US troops, but also larger contingents from other countries, including Pakistan, Nigeria, Italy and France. However the operation became a disaster when US forces got drawn into fighting with the forces of one of the main Somali warlords, Mohamed Farah Aidid. They killed 24 Pakistani UN troops and then, during the so-called "Battle of Mogadishu" in October 1993, a total of 18 US soldiers on a single day, with some of their bodies being dragged through the streets of the city. Hundreds of Somalis also died, and one particular incident, when Aidid's forces shot down a US helicopter, became the subject of the hit film, "Black Hawk Down".

That prompted US president Bill Clinton to change tack, and by the end of the following March all US troops had been pulled out of Somalia. The Horn of Africa country, which had been without an effective government since the overthrow of military ruler Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, once again dropped off world news headlines.

It attracted attention once again after August 1998, when bomb attacks carried out by the Islamic fundamentalist group Al-Qaeda caused carnage at US embassies in neighbouring Kenya and in Tanzania, further to the south. The US suspected that Al-Qaeda was taking advantage of the lawlessness in Somalia, a predominantly Muslim country, to organise there. The scrutiny increased further after September 2001, when Al-Qaeda made its devastating attacks on the United States.

In 2002, as part of its newly-declared "war on terror", the US was allowed to set up a military base in the strategic former French colony of Djibouti, which borders Somalia and also faces the southern entrance to the Red Sea. The base -- the only military facility which Washington officially possesses on the African continent -- is used both to keep an eye on events in Somalia and to patrol the strategic seaways in the Arabian Sea. In March 2003 six armed Americans in civilian clothes abducted a Yemeni-born man from a Mogadishu hospital and flew him out of the country.

And then in early 2006, as the Islamic Courts movement began to take control of much of Somalia, the US intervened to provide financial support to an alliance of warlords that was opposed to them. The move failed, however, as by mid-year the Islamic Courts had taken control of Mogadishu and much of central and southern Somalia, bringing back a semblance of order for the first time in 15 years.

The US then decided to support neighbouring Ethiopia, which has a long history of conflict with Somalia, in an operation against the Islamic movement. Ethiopian forces intervened in December 2006 in support of the weak official government that had originally been set up outside Somalia, and had headquarters in the provincial town of Baidoa. Thanks in part to logistical aid and intelligence provided by the US, the Ethiopian forces took just 12 days to rout the Islamists. On Monday, the US forces intervened directly again on Somali territory, attacking remnants of the Islamic forces in the south of the country.


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