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A new scramble for Africa? US military intervention on Continent increases
The U.S. also announced this month it is sending 100 advisers, most of them special forces, to battle the rebel group Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Central Africa and nail its leader, Joseph Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC). In Libya, U.S. fighter planes helped rebels defeat former leader Muammar Gadhafi.
The latest attack against Africa’s militants saw Kenya this month deploy troops into southern Somalia to fight al-Shabaab insurgents. The U.S. says it is not aiding Kenya’s incursion, but America has given Kenya US$24 million this year in military and police aid “to counter terrorists and participate in peacekeeping operations,” the U.S. Embassy said.
The U.S. government “has had a burr under its saddle about Somalia” for years, dating to the 1993 downing of two U.S. helicopters over Mogadishu, a battle known as Black Hawk Down in which 18 U.S. troops died, said John Pike of the Globalsecurity.org think tank near Washington. Back then, Washington deployed thousands of troops to combat a famine but the mission escalated into a hunt for warlords.
These days, only a handful of U.S. troops are involved directly in Somalia, special forces who enter on kill missions. In 2009, Navy SEALs targeted and killed al-Qaida operative Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in a helicopter raid. The Americans jumped out of the helicopters, grabbed Nabhan’s body from his bullet-riddled convoy and flew off. The corpse, like Osama bin Laden’s two years later, was buried at sea.
Pike, who monitors defense issues, said the Pentagon has ramped up operations in Africa tremendously since the time of then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“The U.S. has really developed an interest in Africa that we just have never seen before,” Pike said. “Between all the goings and comings in the Horn of Africa and all this snake-eater (special forces) Sahara stuff, ungoverned territories, it’s all over the place. Since I think an awful lot of it is being run out of Special Operations Command and out of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), I think it is probably far larger than anyone imagines.”
U.S. drones launched from the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean also provide intelligence, and the pilotless planes are capable of being armed.
Al-Shabab counts 31 American citizens among its ranks, a U.S. official in Washington told The Associated Press. They’re mostly American-Somalis who left the U.S. to join the group. The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters, said foreign fighters among al-Shabab’s ranks want to attack Western targets.
Intelligence has revealed sophisticated and fairly advanced plans by al-Shabaab to attack targets in Europe, the official said, but the operations have been disrupted by the recent stepped-up fighting in Somalia.
