Al-Shabaab

The presence of US troops in Somalia helps the Islamist insurgency Al Shabaab recruit, exacerbating the very violence they claim to be fighting. But the House has voted down a resolution to withdraw. On April 27, the House voted 101-321 against Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz’s resolution to remove all US troops from Somalia, even as all signs point to escalation in the fight with Al-Shabaab. AFRICOM, the US Africa Command, and Somalia’s president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, are both asking for […]

Biden has reversed Donald Trump’s withdrawal of US forces from Somalia and will redeploy Special Operations Forces. It is just the latest move in a long history of destructive US-UK meddling in the Horn of Africa. Almost as soon as the administration of President Joseph Biden announced a redeployment of US Special Operations Forces to Somalia on May 16, the Western media began to spin the intervention. As the BBC framed it, Biden’s deployment would “support the fight against militant […]

US and British meddling transformed Somalia’s al-Shabaab into an extremist group, inflaming the humanitarian crisis that persists throughout the country. This July, the Biden administration picked up where Trump left off and began bombing Somalia, a country with a gross domestic product of less than $6 billion and a poverty rate of 70 percent. But why? The official reason provided by the Pentagon was that the Somali National Army needed air support in its operations to counter al-Shabaab. But the […]

Despite Trump's decision to remove troops from Somalia, ramped-up airstrikes and record death tolls prove that America’s bloody legacy in the region is not over.
The post America’s Half a Century of War in Somalia Comes to an End. Sort Of appeared first on MintPress News.

Shaky opinions, terrible decisions and 14,000 photos of cake + this day in history w/Lars vs. Napster and our song of the day by M. Ward on your Morning Monarchy for July 11, 2018.

Sputnik – March 3, 2018 A US senator has revealed that Washington is struggling with its mission to break militant group al-Shabab’s hold on Somalia. Some 500 US troops are working with the Somali military and other African partners to eradicate al-Shabab from their strongholds in Somalia. “Our doctrine is…to disrupt, clear, hold. We’re finding it difficult to hold,” Jack […]

Last week’s US air operation in Somalia took the total number of strikes carried out in 2017 to a record 29, raising the possibility of an expansion in military operations outside of conventional battlefields under President Donald Trump.
Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama had already escalated strikes in Somalia to 14 a year, reflecting the growing number of attacks by al Shabaab insurgents.

New details emerged Tuesday about the possible motivations behind a bomb attack that killed more than 300 people in the Somalia capital of Mogadishu over the weekend—the deadliest such violence in the nation’s history—with the information suggesting the bombing may been in direct retaliation for a raid by U.S. soldiers this summer that left 10 civilians, including children, dead.
The Guardian reports:

(ANTIMEDIA Op-Ed) — On Sunday, the U.S. military carried out an airstrike in Somalia against al-Qaeda-linked terror group al-Shabaab, U.S. officials said on Monday, as reported by Reuters.

(ANTIWAR.COM) — Pentagon officials have confirmed that they carried out an airstrike Sunday morning inside the country of Somalia, and that they were trying to target the al-Shabaab insurgency, saying they were after “specific militant targets.”