The Somalian warlords who slaughtered US soldiers are working for Bush now

Black Hawk Down Revisited


Somalia is still ruled by the brutal warlords who dragged dead US soldiers through the streets in 1993. But times change. Now they are America's new allies in the war on terror


THIRTEEN years after President Bill Clinton withdrew forces from Somalia, in the "Black Hawk down" shambles, American security officials are giving clandestine support to the same warlords who mutilated and humiliated US soldiers in 1993.

The American Operation, in breach of the United Nations' arms embargo on Somalia and therefore in breach of international law, is controlled through the US Embassy in Kenya and Washington's 1800-strong Combined Joint Task Force in Djibouti, on Somalia's northern border.

The Combined Joint Task Force, under Admiral Richard Hunt, is an anti-terrorist operation for the troubled Horn of Africa, but most specifically for Somalia, which has had no effective government since 1991 and is seen as an ideal place for al-Qaeda activists to hide and plot attacks.

Somalia is only a short boat ride from Yemen and is a historic doorway to Africa from the Middle East. No visas are needed to enter Somalia and there is no police force. The country has a weak and ineffective transitional government operating largely out of neighbouring Kenya. Most of Somalia is in mayhem and lawlessness, ruled by a patchwork of competing warlords; the capital is too unsafe for even Somalia's acting prime minister to visit.

The US, terrified that Islamists allied to al-Qaeda are gaining control in Somalia, has turned to the kind of warlords who once dragged dead American soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, as its new allies in the "war on terror".

Africa Confidential, the London-based intelligence newsletter, reports in its latest edition: "CIA staff certainly helped to organise the [Somali warlord] Alliance, with, we hear, the involvement of at least one National Intelligence Support Group." Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, told the Sunday Herald: "If what is happening now in Somalia was happening in Latin America, it would be a new Iran-Contra scandal." He is referring to the biggest political scandal in the United States during the 1980s. It involved several members of the Reagan administration who in 1986 helped sell arms to Iran, an avowed enemy, and used the proceeds to fund the Contras, a right-wing guerrilla group in Nicaragua.

The Somali Alliance – or, more fully, the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism [ARPCT] – is a group of once-discredited warlords who, with Washington's backing as "counter-terrorists", depict their own opponents in perhaps the world's most anarchistic theatre as agents of al-Qaeda.

So far, the efforts of the US-backed Alliance have met with no success. No "terrorists" have been detained, and Alliance forces have not fared well in ferocious house-to-house fighting against Islamist militias that control most of Mogadishu.

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