More than a decade after US troops withdrew from Somalia following a disastrous military intervention, officials of Somalia’s interim government and some US 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 US support of the militias for provoking the clashes.
US 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.”
US officials have long feared that Somalia, which has had no effective government since 1991, is a desirable place for Al-Qaeda 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 US officials that working with the warlords is shortsighted and dangerous.
“We would prefer that the US 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 US in Somalia. But in a more constructive way. Clearly we have a common objective to stabilize Somalia, but the US 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 US 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.” US 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 Counterterrorism, in what some Somalis said was a marketing ploy to get US support.
But some US 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-Qaeda 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-Qaeda and like-minded terrorists,” said one senior administration official in Washington. “We’ve got very clear interests in trying to ensure that Al-Qaeda 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-Qaeda base.
A senior US 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 US had yet to decide where it was most useful to be placed.
The source said Somalia was “not an Al-Qaeda safe haven” yet, adding, “There are some there, but it’s so dysfunctional.” US officials specifically believe a small number of Al-Qaeda operatives who were involved in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania are now residing in Somalia.
Other analysts outside the government said they were convinced the Bush administration was backing the warlords as part of its global war against terrorism.
“The US relies on buying intelligence from warlords and other participants in the Somali conflict, and hoping that the strongest of the warlords can snatch a live suspect or two if the intelligence identifies their whereabouts,” said John Prendergast, the director for African affairs in the Clinton administration and now a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, a think tank. “This strategy might reduce the short-term threat of another terrorist attack in East Africa, but in the long-term the conditions which allow terrorist cells to take hold along the Indian Ocean coastline go unaddressed. We ignore these conditions at our peril.”
“Are we talking to them and doing some of that? Yes,” said Ted Dagne, the leading Africa analyst for Congressional Research Service.
“We fought some of these warlords in 1993 and now we are dealing with some of them again, perhaps supporting some of them against other groups. Somalia is still considered by some as an attractive location for terrorist groups.”
The issue of US backing came to the forefront this winter when warlords formed the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism after a fundamentalist Islamic group began asserting itself in the capital, setting up courts of Islamic law and building schools and hospitals.
