Strategy in Somalia reveals new face of war for US
Sunday October 16, 2016
Al
Shabab militants from Somalia attacked the Westgate mall in Nairobi,
Kenya, in 2013, leaving it in ruins and killing more than 60 people and
wounding more than .
The Somalia
campaign, as described by US and African officials and international
monitors of the conflict, is partly designed to avoid repeating that
debacle, which led to the deaths of 18 US soldiers. But it carries
enormous risks — including more US casualties, botched airstrikes that
kill civilians, and the potential for the United States to be drawn even
more deeply into a troubled country that has stymied all efforts to fix
it.
But the Somalia campaign is a blueprint for warfare that President Obama has embraced and will pass along to his successor. It is a model the United States now employs across the Middle East and North Africa — from Syria to Libya — despite the president’s stated aversion to American "boots on the ground” in the world’s war zones. This year alone, the United States has carried out airstrikes in seven countries and conducted Special Operations missions in many more.
US
officials said the White House had quietly broadened the president’s
authority for the use of force in Somalia by allowing airstrikes to
protect US and African troops as they combat fighters from Al Shabab, a
Somali-based militant group that pledges allegiance to Al Qaeda.
In
its public announcements, the Pentagon sometimes characterizes the
operations as "self-defense strikes,” though some analysts have said
this rationale has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is only because
US forces are being deployed on the front lines in Somalia that they
face imminent threats from Al Shabab.
America’s role in Somalia
has expanded as Al Shabab has become bolder and more cunning. The group
has attacked police headquarters, bombed restaurants, killed Somali
generals, and stormed fortified bases used by African Union troops. In
January, Al Shabab fighters killed more than 100 Kenyan troops.
The
group carried out the 2013 attack at the Westgate mall, which killed
over 60 people and wounded over 175 in Nairobi, Kenya. More recently it
has branched into more sophisticated terrorism, including nearly downing
a Somali airliner in February with a bomb hidden in a laptop computer.
About
200 to 300 US Special Operations troops work with soldiers from Somalia
and other African nations like Kenya and Uganda to carry out over a
half-dozen raids per month, according to senior US military officials.
The operations are a combination of ground raids and drone strikes. The
Navy’s classified SEAL Team 6 has been heavily involved in many of these
operations.
Once ground operations are complete, US troops
working with Somali forces often interrogate prisoners at temporary
screening facilities before detainees are transferred to more permanent
Somali-run prisons, US officials said.
The strikes have had a mixed record. In March, a US airstrike killed more than 150 Al Shabab fighters at what military officials called a "graduation ceremony,” one of the single deadliest US airstrikes in any country in recent years. But an airstrike last month killed more than a dozen Somali government soldiers, who were US allies against Al Shabab.
Outraged Somali officials said the Americans had been duped by clan rivals and fed bad intelligence, laying bare the complexities of waging a shadow war in Somalia.. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the Pentagon was investigating the strike.
Some experts point out that with the administration’s expanded self-defense justification for airstrikes, a greater US presence in Somalia would inevitably lead to an escalation of the air campaign.
"It is clear that US on-the-ground
support to Somali security forces and African Union peacekeepers has
been stepped up this year,” said Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert at
Davidson College. "That increases the likelihood that US advisers will
periodically be in positions where Al Shabab is about to launch an
attack.”
Peter Cook, the Defense Department spokesman, wrote in
an email, "The DoD has a strong partnership with the Somali National
Army and AMISOM forces from Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and
Burundi operating in Somalia. They have made steady progress pressuring
Al Shabab.”
The escalation of the war can be seen in the
bureaucratic language of the semiannual notifications that Obama sends
to Congress about US conflicts overseas.
The Somalia passage in
the June 2015 notification is terse, saying US troops "have worked to
counter the terrorist threat posed by al-Qaida and associated elements
of Al Shabab.”
This past June, however, the president told Congress that the United States had become engaged in a more expansive mission.
Besides
hunting members of al-Qaida and Al Shabab, the notification said, US
troops are in Somalia "to provide advice and assistance to regional
counterterrorism forces, including the Somali National Army and African
Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) forces.”
US airstrikes, it
said, were carried out in defense of the African troops and in one
instance because Al Shabab fighters "posed an imminent threat to US and
AMISOM forces.”
At an old Russian fighter jet base in Baledogle,
about 70 miles from the Somali capital, Mogadishu, US Marines, and
private contractors are working to build up a Somali military unit
designed to combat Al Shabab throughout the country.
Soldiers for
the military unit, called Danab, which means lightning in Somali, are
recruited by employees of Bancroft Global Development, a
Washington-based company that for years has worked with the State
Department to train African Union troops and embed with them on military
operations inside Somalia.
Michael Stock, the company’s founder,
said the Danab recruits received initial training at a facility in
Mogadishu before they were sent to Baledogle, where they go through
months of training by the Marines. Bancroft advisers then accompany the
Somali fighters on missions.
Stock said the goal was to create a
small Somali military unit capable of battling Al Shabab without
repeating the mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the United States
spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to build up large armies.
Still,
US commanders and their international partners are considering a
significant expansion of the training effort to potentially include
thousands of Somali troops who would protect the country when African
Union forces eventually left the country.
Major General Kurt L.
Sonntag, commander of the US military’s task force in Djibouti, the only
permanent US base in Africa, said the proposed training plan would
increase and enhance the Somali national security forces, including the
army, national guard, and national police.
"The specific numbers
of forces required is currently being assessed,” Sonntag said. He added
that it must be large enough to protect the Somali people but
"affordable and sustainable over time, in terms of Somalia’s national
budget.”
Independent experts and aid organizations say the Somali
army is still largely untrained, poorly paid and poorly equipped, and
years away from coalescing regional militias into a unified army.
US
policymakers tried to avoid direct involvement in Somalia for years
after the Black Hawk Down episode. But in the years after the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks, Special Operations troops and the CIA began paying Somali
warlords to hunt down al-Qaida operatives in the country.
In
2006, the United States gave clandestine support to Ethiopian troops
invading the country to overthrow an Islamist movement that had taken
control of Mogadishu. But the brutal urban warfare tactics of the
Ethiopian troops created support for an insurgent movement that called
itself Al Shabab, which means "The Youth.”
US involvement in
Somalia was intermittent for several years afterward, until the Westgate
attack refocused Washington’s attention on the threat Al Shabab posed
beyond Somalia.
Al Shabab still control thousands of square miles
of territory across Somalia. A Somali university student who travels in
and out of Al Shabab areas said the group’s fighters were becoming
increasingly suspicious, even paranoid, checking the phones, cameras,
computers, and documents of anyone passing through their territory,
constantly on guard for another US attack. He said Al Shabab fighters
were becoming younger, with a vast majority under 25 and many as young
as 10.
US law enforcement officials think that the bomb that
nearly brought down the commercial jet in February was most likely made
by a Yemeni who is believed to have constructed other laptop bombs in
Somalia. Pictures from an airport X-ray machine show the explosive
packed into the corner of the laptop, next to a 9-volt battery. Several
aviation experts said that the bomb was obvious and that airport
security officials in Mogadishu might have intentionally allowed it
through.
The bomb exploded about 15 minutes after takeoff,
punching a hole through the fuselage and killing the man suspected of
carrying the bomb on board, though the pilot was able to land safely.
Aviation experts said that if the bomb had exploded a few minutes later,
with the cabin fully pressurized, the fuselage would have most likely
blown apart, killing all of the approximately 80 people on board.
Strategy in Somalia reveals new face of war for US
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has intensified a clandestine war in Somalia over the past year, using Special Operations troops, airstrikes, private contractors, and African allies in an escalating campaign against militants in the anarc