Following reported al-Shabaab attacks on a pair of southern Somalia army
bases, the US carried out an airstrike against a target in Jilib, near
the site of the attacks, and is claiming to have killed 52 people, all described as “al-Shabaab extremists.”
If confirmed, this is the deadliest US strike in Somalia since October.
The US has been escalating attacks against targets inside Somalia since
President Trump took office, and those strikes seem to remain on the
upswing.
Though the initial assumption was
that the strike was connected to the recent al-Shabaab attack in
neighboring Kenya, the Africom statement makes clear this was direct
retaliation for the strikes on the Somali military bases, not for the
Nairobi incident.
Al-Shabaab issued its own statement on those attacks, claiming to have
killed at least 41 Somali soldiers in the course of raiding two bases
near the port city of Kismayo. Somalia has not commented on the
casualties.
Given that U.S. military actions tend to leave extremists in their wake, killing innocent people before they can radicalize could make a lot of sense from a certain point of view.
True. Although it is a sickening point of view.
Vietnam vets were forced to live with the ‘destroy village to save it’ dysfunction; to their credit, most couldn’t fathom something so fundamentally irrational and sociopathic. This generation of soldiers and civilians are being forced as well.
The only question is, will this be rejected or can the war machine successfully break the hearts and minds of its own.
There are many reasons to continue the Long War against all reason, the most critical of all being to change what is thought reasonable.
The psychology of sociopathology, creating and sustaining a critical bubble of moral unreason as nonetheless foundational to functioning society instead of aberrant. This isn’t playing with fire, but ionizing radioactivity.