In Somalia, the US is bombing the very ‘terrorists’ it created

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 actual reason was that Somalia is geo-strategically important to US empire.

[thegrayzone.com]

Well that sounds kind of familiar. Ah yes. Capitalism moves on from Afghanistan to Somalia. That must be it? Welcome back to capitalism Somalia, you're its new bitch, again.

{As we shall see, in the mid-2000s, a fragile coalition of soft and hard Islamists – explicitly not allied to al-Qaeda at the time – brought some measure of peace to the areas of Somalia it controlled. With help from Britain and neighboring Ethiopia, the US smashed the coalition and pushed more right-wing elements like al-Shabaab over the edge into militancy.}

Now now boys, we can't tolerate peace in an area we need the resources of. We can't allow you to manage a means to use them for peace and unity providing a prosperous society.

{And of course, the global superpower bombing one of the poorest countries on Earth in the name of national security is not terrorism.]

You're forcing us to install some good ole democracy here. Responsibility? Now there's a new one.

The US commander, Lt. Gen. Anthony Zinni, said at the time, “I’m not counting bodies… I’m not interested.”

{One could say that the Biden administration has learned no lessons after decades of interference in Somalia. But this would be inaccurate. Successive US administrations understand perfectly that stirring the pot of extremism and relying on propaganda to report the result, not the process, gives them endless excuses to occupy other countries.

The Pentagon is committed to global domination, Somalia is a strategic chokepoint, and the Department of Defense needs reasons to maintain its presence in the country.

The US created al-Shabaab in several ways. First, it escalated Islamist vs. non-Islamist tensions by backing secular “warlords” as a proxy against the ICU in the mid-2000s. This alienated the moderate factions of the ICU and empowered the right-wing Islamists.}