The African Union has criticized Washington’s support of warlords in Somalia and appealed to the United States to back the national government instead of the opposing militias who seek to quell any signs of emerging peace in Somalia.
According to various media reports, the US government has been paying up to $150,000 a month to the antigovernment militias who call themselves the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-terrorism (ARPC). It has also been reported that the US has been supplying weapons to the ARPC to fight the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in order to wipe out anyone whom Washington suspects of having links with Al-Qaeda. This is in spite of the fact that the ICU has the proven potential to establish viable peace in war-torn Somalia.
The media has also recently been reporting that in order to unseat the ICU, which is soon poised to take full control of Somalia, some of Somalia’s neighboring countries have been coordinating with the US to help the ARPC warlords recruit hundreds of mercenaries. The ICU has already established its authority in the capital Mogadishu and most of the other major cities in the country. Any sort of US intervention would only lead Somalia towards a new bloodbath and further massacres, something that would tear into pieces the remaining fragments of this African nation.
It has been acknowledged that in the run up to the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, the US administration depended largely on false information and baseless allegations against the Taleban and Saddam Hussein. Even now the US government pays thousands of dollars to Afghan and Iraqi informers for clues that may lead them to Taleban and Al-Qaeda supporters. Policies such as this have tragically led the American forces to fill prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Kandahar and the secret detention camps across the world with many innocent people.
US planes indiscriminately bomb populous towns and villages claiming they are attacking terrorist breeding centers and militant hideouts. Thousands of men, women and children are left dead and crippled as a result of these indiscriminate bombings. The practice of supplying information, mostly false, has obviously become a lucrative business for the locals, for whom a hundred dollars is more than a small fortune.
The Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Conference should positively take an interest in the affairs of Somalia before the United States converts it to another inferno as it did in Afghanistan and Iraq.
President George W. Bush said he was worried about the developments in Somalia and would decide what steps to be taken in the near future. There is nothing in his statement that hints that his decision would be any different from what the US decided in relation to Iraq or Afghanistan, something that foretells yet another tragedy. It is therefore imperative for the Arab and Islamic nations to convince the US to leave the future of Somalia to be decided by its people and avoid the gushing of another river of blood from the Horn of Africa.
In an interview with the Arab media, Sharif Sheikh Ahmad, chief of the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia, vehemently refuted allegations that the ICU was connected in anyway, closely or remotely, to Al-Qaeda. He further said he hopes that the US will one day admit that they were misled about Somalia as has happened earlier in the case of Iraq.
