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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

U.S. role in Somali fighting alleged

Emily Wax and Karen Deyoung Washington Post

More than a decade after U.S. troops withdrew from Somalia following a disastrous military intervention, officials of Somalia’s interim government and some U.S. analysts of Africa policy say the United States has returned to the African country, secretly supporting secular warlords who have been waging fierce battles against Islamic groups for control of the capital, Mogadishu.

The latest clashes, last week and over the weekend, were some of the most violent in Mogadishu since the end of the American intervention in 1994, and left 150 dead and hundreds more wounded. Leaders of the interim government blamed U.S. support of the militias for provoking the clashes.

U.S. officials have declined to directly address on the record the question of backing Somali warlords, who have styled themselves as a counterterrorism coalition in an open bid for American support.

Speaking to reporters recently, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States would “work with responsible individuals … in fighting terror. It’s a real concern of ours – terror taking root in the Horn of Africa. We don’t want to see another safe haven for terrorists created. Our interest is purely in seeing Somalia achieve a better day.”

U.S. officials have long feared that Somalia, which has had no effective government since 1991, is a desirable place for al-Qaida members to hide and plan attacks. The country is strategically located on the Horn of Africa, a boat ride away from Yemen and a longtime gateway to Africa from the Middle East. No visas are needed to enter Somalia, there is no police force and no effective central authority.

The country has a weak transitional government operating largely out of neighboring Kenya and the southern city of Baidoa. Most of Somalia is in anarchy, ruled by a patchwork of competing warlords; the capital is too unsafe for even Somalia’s acting prime minister to visit.

Leaders of the transitional government said they have warned U.S. officials that working with the warlords is shortsighted and dangerous.

“We would prefer that the U.S. work with the transitional government and not with criminals,” the prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, said in an interview. “This is a dangerous game. Somalia is not a stable place and we want the U.S. in Somalia. But in a more constructive way. Clearly we have a common objective to stabilize Somalia, but the U.S. is using the wrong channels.”

Many of the warlords have their own agendas, Somali officials said, and some reportedly fought against the United States in 1993 during street battles that culminated in an attack that downed two American Black Hawk helicopters and left 18 Army Rangers dead.

“The U.S. government funded the warlords in the recent battle in Mogadishu, there is no doubt about that,” government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari told journalists by telephone from Baidoa. “This cooperation … only fuels further civil war.”

U.S. officials have refused repeated requests to provide details on the nature and extent of their support for the coalition of warlords, which has called itself the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-terrorism, in what some Somalis said was a marketing ploy to get U.S. support.

But some U.S. officials, who declined to be identified by name because of the sensitivity of the issue, have said they are generally talking to these leaders to prevent people with suspected ties to al-Qaida from being given safe haven in the lawless country.

“There are complicated issues in Somalia in that the government does not control Mogadishu and it has the potential for becoming a safe haven for al-Qaida and like-minded terrorists,” said one senior administration official in Washington. “We’ve got very clear interests in trying to ensure that al-Qaida members are not using it to hide and to plan attacks.” He said it was “a very difficult issue” trying to both show support for the fledgling interim government while also working to prevent Somalia from becoming an al-Qaida base.

A senior U.S. intelligence official, who also asked not to be named, said it was a “Hobbesian” situation – that the transitional government in Kenya was in its “fifteenth iteration” and it, too, was a “collection of warlords” that played both sides of the fence.

The official said that it presented a classic “enemy of our enemy” situation and that the U.S. had yet to decide where it was most useful to be placed.

The source said Somalia was “not an al-Qaida safe haven” yet, adding, “There are some there, but it’s so dysfunctional.” U.S. officials specifically believe a small number of al-Qaida operatives who were involved in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania are now residing in Somalia.

The issue of U.S. backing came to the forefront this winter when warlords formed the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism after a fundamentalist Islamic group began asserting itself in the capital, setting up courts of Islamic law and building schools and hospitals.

Soon after, the coalition of warlords were well-equipped with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and antiaircraft guns that were used in heavy fighting in the capital last week. It was the second round of fighting this year, following clashes in March that killed more than 90 people, mostly civilians, and emptied neighborhoods around the capital.

In a report to the U.N. Security Council this month, the international body’s monitoring group on Somalia said it was investigating an unnamed country’s secret support for an anti-terrorism alliance, in apparent violation of a U.N. arms embargo.

The experts said they were told during January and February of this year that “financial support was being provided to help organize and structure a militia force created to counter the threat posed by the growing militant fundamentalist movement in central and southern Somalia.”