Trump escalates US drone war in Somalia
By
Timotheos Gaist
8 July 2017
The Trump White House escalated American imperialism’s decades-long war in Somalia this week, ordering American military drones to launch repeated airstrikes against insurgent strongholds in southern regions of the impoverished Horn of Africa nation.
On Sunday, a US MQ-9 Reaper drone fired Hellfire missiles against an al Shabaab camp near the capital, Mogadishu. On Tuesday, American forces carried out another drone strike, described by the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) as a “collective self-defense strike,” against “an al Shabaab troop concentration.” The attacks are openly acknowledged in American ruling class media as marking the onset of a major expansion of the war.
During its first six months in office, the Trump administration has laid the foundations for a wider war in Somalia, extending and building upon the general policy of covert and proxy war against Somalia pursued by the previous two administrations under the banner of the “global war on terrorism.”
In March, Trump granted US commanders open-ended authority to wage war throughout southern Somalia, without approval by civilian authorities. In April, President Trump approved deployment of scores of regular American ground troops to Somalia, the first such deployments since the 1992 “Operation Restore Hope,” which saw some 30,000 imperialist troops dispatched to the outskirts of Mogadishu, under the pretext of providing humanitarian aid.
The Trump White House now favors “even more permissive rules of engagement for drone operations in Yemen and Somalia,” Center for Drone Studies expert Dan Gettinger told Fox News last week.
The drone war in Somalia, waged by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for more…