US assassination in Somalia

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US assassination in Somalia
By Brian Smith
21 September 2009

United States commandos from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations
Command launched a helicopter raid last week in Somalia, close to the
border with Kenya, and killed a key Islamist suspect.

Some reports state that four helicopter gunships, others say it was
six, took off shortly after noon from a US Navy warship offshore. Less
than an hour later the helicopters strafed a small group of four-wheel
drives carrying Islamist militants linked to al Shabaab, which
Washington accuses of being Al Qaeda’s proxy in Somalia.

The attack took place as the convoy sped towards the coastal town of
Barawe, about 150 miles south of the capital, Mogadishu, deep in
territory controlled by al Shabaab.

The primary target was Kenyan-born Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, who was on
the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “most wanted” list and who has
been hunted by Washington since 2002.

“Our security intelligence reports confirm that Nabhan was killed,”
stated Somali official Abdi Fitah Shawey.

Several trucks, including a Land Cruiser carrying Nabhan and other
senior militants, were hit by commandos firing machineguns and
automatic weapons. Two of the helicopters landed and there was a brief
fire fight in which nine militants were killed, according to al
Shabaab. Troops jumped from the helicopters, inspected the wreckage
and seized the body of Nabhan and at least one other militant, along
with two other injured militants, before flying off.

Senior US officials, on condition of anonymity, confirmed that
President Obama had signed off on the operation.

Security sources in Kenya believe that US commanders would have
received specific and urgent intelligence that Nabhan was on the move,
and a US adviser concurred: “This approach was, ‘Let’s do it very
quickly, very swiftly and confirm he’s gone,’” he said.

The overwhelming firepower used is demonstrated by the comments of US
sources. “These young fighters do not have the same skills as their
colleagues in Afghanistan or elsewhere when it comes to foreign air
strikes,” a government source told Reuters. “They are in confusion now.”

Some locals reported that troops involved in the operation in Barawe
had French flags on their uniforms, which France denied. France, like
the US, has a large military base in neighbouring Djibouti.

Nabhan was linked by Washington to the 2002 truck bombing of an
Israeli-run hotel in Kenya in which 15 people died, and was also
alleged to have been involved in an attempt to bring down an airplane,
carrying mostly Israeli tourists, with a rocket-propelled grenade as
it was taking off from Kenya’s Mombasa airport later the same day.

The Kenyan authorities, who work closely with Washington, also regard
Nabhan as a suspect in the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania in 1998 that killed 229 people. The US accused Nabhan of
running Al Qaeda training camps in Somalia for local and foreign fighters.

Al Shabaab has vowed to retaliate.

Rashid Abdi, a Somalia analyst at the International Crisis Group,
commented, “A backlash in Somalia is bound to happen, but what is more
worrying is what kind of retaliation we might see against Western
targets in the Horn of Africa region.”

The Obama administration claims there is a growing Al Qaeda influence
in the Horn of Africa, using this supposed link to justify providing
greater military and economic support for the puppet Somali
Transitional Federal Government (TFG) against insurgents such as al
Shabaab, who along with allied Islamist militias now control the bulk
of the country.

During her Africa tour last month, US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton met Somali president Sheikh Sharif Ahmed and promised him
support to combat al Shabaab, in addition to the 40 tons of arms and
ammunition sent to Sharif’s government in June.

The US military claims that Somalia is set to become the new base for
Al Qaeda leaders to spread mayhem in Africa, to justify the build-up
of US warships and Special Forces in a geo-politically strategic and
oil-rich area of the globe. But there is little evidence of Al Qaeda
involvement in Somalia, where the insurgency is largely home grown and
is the result of decades of US intervention.

The primary destabilising force in the Horn of Africa in general and
Somalia in particular is the US. The explosive spread of militarism is
rooted in the deepening crisis of US capitalism. As the economic
foundations of the United States claim to global hegemony weaken,
Washington is driven to ever greater reliance on its residual military
superiority. Somalia provides a case study in the immense destruction
and human suffering produced by this policy.

US ships permanently patrol the Gulf of Aden off the Horn of Africa,
one of the world’s major sea lanes allowing access to the Red Sea and
the Suez Canal. The US seeks to dominate the resources, trade and
seaways of the region at the expense of all its imperialist rivals.
China’s presence, whose interests in the region increased in recent
years, has complicated the picture. The US, which has a
long-established base in the former French colony of Djibouti, does
not intend to allow China to challenge its control of this strategic
chokepoint in world trade.

US actions in Somalia over several decades have left the country a
chaotic, lawless hellhole, where about 1 million people are internally
displaced and around 3 million rely on food aid. The lack of a
functioning government acceptable to the population has forced many to
turn to the Islamists for some semblance of stability and order,
however brutal. The US administration has scant regard for the
suffering it has unleashed and regards Somalia as merely another
theatre in its phoney “war on terror.”

Nabhan’s execution by US forces will further weaken the credibility of
the TFG and exacerbate factional infighting. Sharif, a “moderate”
Islamist, was elected in January in an attempt to forge a coalition
between secular and Islamist political factions, but is regarded as a
traitor by his former comrades in the Union of Islamic Courts, and
with suspicion by his former foes.

The US has carried out a series of missile raids aimed at killing
senior Islamists in recent years. In May 2008, US warplanes killed the
leader of al-Shabaab Aden Hashi Ayro, in an attack in Dusamareb in
central Somalia.

They also attempted but failed to kill Nabhan and another Islamist,
Hassan Turki, in March last year when missiles were fired at Dobley in
southern Somalia in a pre-dawn attack, killing at least three women
and three children and wounding scores more. Witnesses said that at
least three missiles struck the town, north of the Kenyan border.

In June 2007 the US navy launched missile strikes on the port of Baar
Gaal and surrounding areas in Puntland in the north of Somalia in
pursuit of three suspects involved in the 1998 Kenyan and Tanzanian
embassy bombings, destroying farms and flattening hilltops. They made
the unlikely claim that only militant Islamists were killed, including
eight foreign militants who were said to be from the US, Britain,
Eritrea, Sweden and Yemen.

In January 2007 the US launched two air strikes, one on Hayi, 30 miles
from Afmadow near the Kenyan border which killed 31 civilians,
including two newlyweds, and the other on a remote island 155 miles
away, which involved a US Air Force AC-130 gunship launched from the
US base in Djibouti. Both were attempts to kill Islamists allegedly
linked to the embassy bombings.

The highly targeted nature of this latest attack demonstrates a change
in US military intervention in Somalia, believes Peter Pham, senior
fellow and director of the Africa Project at the National Committee on
American Foreign Policy in New York. “This marks an evolution in US
operational and intelligence capabilities,” he said.

Somalia can be seen as a model for US strategy in the region and its
development since the US military was driven out of Somalia in 1993
following the “Black Hawk down” incident that claimed the lives of 19
US troops. Since then, the US military has avoided exposing large
numbers of their own troops to danger, in a pattern set by the
Ethiopian invasion of Somalia with local forces providing the ground
troops whilst US Special Forces directed them.

The various missile attacks have followed a similar pattern, with
local intelligence identifying targets and calling in air or naval
support to provide heavy fire power when necessary. The death of
Nabhan, along with the arming of a stooge government, indicates that
Obama intends to continue in the same way.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/soma-s21.shtml

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