Somalia, a US War 'Nobody is Watching'

[tekisui]

To glimpse America's secret war in Africa, you must bang with a rock on the iron gate of the prison in this remote port in northern Somalia. A sleepy guard will yank open a rusty deadbolt. Then, you ask to speak to an inmate named Mohamed Ali Isse.

Isse, 36, is a convicted murderer and jihadist. He is known among his fellow prisoners, with grudging awe, as "The Man with the American Thing in His Leg."

That "thing" is a stainless steel surgical pin screwed into his bullet-shattered femur, courtesy, he says, of the U.S. Navy. How it got there -- or more to the point, how Isse ended up in this crumbling, stone-walled hellhole at the uttermost end of the Earth -- is a story that the U.S. government probably would prefer to remain untold.

That's because Isse and his fancy surgery scars offer what little tangible evidence exists of a bare-knuckled war that has been waged silently, over the past five years, with the sole aim of preventing anarchic Somalia from becoming the world's next Afghanistan.

It is a standoff war in which the Pentagon lobs million-dollar cruise missiles into a famine-haunted African wasteland the size of Texas, hoping to kill lone terror suspects who might be dozing in candlelit huts. (The raids' success or failure is almost impossible to verify.)

It is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants and -- according to Isse and civil rights activists -- secretly imprison them offshore, aboard U.S. warships.

Mostly, though, it is a policy time bomb that will be inherited by the incoming Obama administration: a little-known front in the global war on terrorism that Washington appears to be losing, if it hasn't already been lost.

"Somalia is one of the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11," said Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College in North Carolina. "By any rational metric, what we've ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted."

more: http://www.military.com/news/article/somalia-a-us-war-nobody-is-watching.html?col=1186032310810

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

Thanks for posting this!!

[Gullvann]

2. Interesting.

There seems to be much going on in Somalia lately with the Ethiopian invasion, the emergence of al-shabab, the stoning of the 13 year old girl, the piracy, al-shabab moving against some of the pirates. Rumours of al-shabab trying to destabilize Puntland and Somaliland.

Did not the U.S. claim to have killed the al-shabab leader a little while back... Probably as part of this war.

[eridani]

3. Another link

ICH links tend to stay around longer

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21310.htm