The Pentagon announced on Friday that President Trump ordered the withdrawal of the “majority” of US troops from Somalia.
“The President of the United States has ordered the Department of Defense and the United States Africa Command to reposition the majority of personnel and assets out of Somalia by early 2021,” the Pentagon said in a statement.
The statement said “some forces may be reassigned outside of East Africa,” but the remaining troops will be reassigned to neighboring countries to “allow cross-border operations.”
The US currently has approximately 700 troops in Somalia. The majority of them were sent by the Trump administration. The US operations in the country consist of training local forces, covert raids, and a drone war against al-Shabab.
In November, The New York Times reported on the plan and said the troops would be repositioned to neighboring Djibouti and Kenya, where the US drones that carry out airstrikes in Somalia are based.
President Trump dramatically escalated the air war against al-Shabab by loosening the rules of engagement when he first came into office. In 2019, the Trump administration conducted 63 airstrikes in Somalia, the most US airstrikes on the country in a single year.
The first seven months of 2020 saw more US airstrikes in Somalia than were conducted during both the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama combined.
Due to its size and al-Qaeda affiliation, al-Shabab is sold as a global threat by the US military to justify intervention in Somalia. But the group was born out of resisting a US-backed occupation and only pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda after years of fighting the US and its proxies.
In 2006, the US backed an Ethiopian invasion to oust the Islamic Courts Union, a Muslim coalition that took control of Mogadishu from a group of warlords.
The first recorded attack that al-Shabab claimed responsibility for was in 2007 when the group targeted Ethiopian soldiers who were occupying Mogadishu in a car bombing. It wasn’t until 2012 that al-Shabab announced its loyalty to al-Qaeda.
This is a meaningless farce. Trump is just shuffling his death squads here and there while they continue to sack Somalia for daring to establish a stateless alternative to western colonial liberal democracy. Al-Shabab is basically just a local militia out for revenge. They joined al-Qaeda for branding issues. They have no interests outside of the Horn of Africa, where the US props up several dictatorships far more heinous than al-Shabab.
Al-Shahab is just another Islamic State clone, funded by the usual suspects, the U.S. and Gulf States, probably Israel as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/world/africa/somalia-qatar-uae.html
Al-Shahab is just another death squad strawman proxy army to pretext Western interventions., whatever its origins.
Nothing “Islamic” about the Islamic State–and same goes for the Gulf countries and all the other Muslim majority countries. Islam and Muslim are not synonyms.
too late–biden will triple troop levels
Kinda strange headline. I don’t see any kind of “withdrawal”, nor is any implied in the article.
If Trump would have brought Troops home 3/1/2 years ago he probably would have one reelection
No probably about it. But it would have to be from the number he inherited and not those he sent himself. And HOME.
No surprise. Given another four years, Trump could probably fully withdraw from all the African Sahel.
All he’s done is make things easier for Harris-Biden to undo or capitalize everything he did, back for the worse.
Trump underestimated how much time he had, governing as a moderate, when everyone who supported him was expecting the needed extreme pullback on the foreign policy front.
I don’t put much credence in any word or tweet coming from the Orange Egotist.
Withdraw ALL. No more bs.
Most Americans don’t know about the secret war in Somalia which is a bigger secret than Reagan’s war in Nicaragua. US Troops are there and drone strikes go on and not a word about it in the MSM.