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US missile strike kills women
and children at Kenya/Somalia border
WSWS
By Bill Van Auken
4 March 2008
The US military fired missiles at a town in southern Somalia in
the pre-dawn hours of Monday morning, killing and wounding
civilians. Local officials in the town of Dobley told news
agencies that at least three women and three children were killed
in the attack and another 20 wounded.
Fatuma Abdullah, a resident of Dobley, told the BBC that he and
other residents were awakened by the sound of explosions. “When we
came out we found our neighbor’s house completely obliterated, as
if no house existed there.”
Witnesses said that at least three missiles struck the town, which
is just north of the Kenyan border. This is the fourth such US
attack on the impoverished East African country in the space of 14
months.
There were conflicting reports as to the specific source of the
attack. The Associated Press stated that US naval forces, armed
with cruise missiles, were responsible. The AP cited an unnamed
Pentagon official who said that the bombardment was carried out
with Tomahawk missiles fired from a US submarine.
Other attacks have been carried out from American warships, which
constantly patrol Somalia’s 1,800-mile coast, which borders
strategically key shipping routes between the Red Sea and the
Indian Ocean.
Reports from witnesses in Dobley, however, cited the presence of
AC130 attack gunships, the type of aircraft the US used in
attacking the same area in January of last year. A resident of the
town speaking by phone to the BBC said, “Right now—in full
daylight—the planes keep flying over us. They are so low that
we’re deafened by their engines. We are poor civilians living in a
simple town. What have we done to deserve this bombing?”
“I woke up to loud blasts and flashing lights that shook my doors
and windows. Airplanes were flying at a low altitude and were
firing. I ran outside and hid under trees,” Saed Abdulle, a Dobley
elder, told the German news agency DPA.
Many residents were reported fleeing the town for fear that the
American military would continue raining death from the sky.
Predictably, Washington justified the slaughter in the name of the
“war on terrorism.” A Pentagon official described it as “a
deliberate, precise strike against a known terrorist and his
associates.” Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman told the
media, “As we have repeatedly said, we will continue to pursue
terrorist activities and their operations wherever we may find
them.”
The global eruption of US militarism is producing such “precision
strikes” by Washington and its surrogates with increasing
frequency in every corner of the globe. The attack on civilians in
Somalia comes less than a week after the dispatch of warships to
the coast of Lebanon, posing an ominous threat of US military
intervention against opposition forces in Lebanon itself, as well
as in support of Washington’s ally, Israel, as it employs
US-supplied weapons to carry out devastating attacks on the
Palestinian population of Gaza.
Meanwhile, in Latin America, the government of Colombia, the Bush
administration’s principal regional ally—and the fifth largest
recipient of US military aid after Israel, Egypt, Pakistan and
Afghanistan—has brought the region to the brink of war by
massacring leading members of the FARC guerrilla movement in a
cross-border raid against their camp in Ecuador. The Colombian
counter-insurgency forces operate under the supervision of US
Special Forces “advisors” and utilize American intelligence to
direct such attacks.
In other regions, the US administration proceeds with equal
recklessness, as in the drive to sever Kosovo from Serbia and the
continuous provocations against Iran.
All the while, the US military remains bogged down in the
quagmires created by the US invasions and occupations of Iraq and
Afghanistan.
There is, no doubt, an element of political calculation by the
Bush administration in pursuing such policies as it enters its
last ten months in office. The Republican Party intends to contest
the November elections on the basis of a fear-mongering campaign,
proclaiming the ubiquitous threat of terrorism and the need for
strong “national security.” The greater the global instability
created by US actions, the more fodder they will have for such an
effort.
More fundamentally, the explosive spread of American militarism is
rooted in the deepening crisis of US capitalism, reflected in the
precipitous fall of the dollar and the cancerous spread of a
credit crisis that is increasingly manifested in the contraction
of production and employment. As the economic foundations of the
US claim to global hegemony weaken, the American ruling elite is
driven to ever greater reliance on its residual military
superiority.
Somalia provides a case study in the immense destruction and human
suffering produced by this policy. The Bush administration helped
engineer and backed an Ethiopian invasion to overthrow the Islamic
Courts Union (ICU), the regime formed by the Somalia’s Islamic
courts, businessmen and some local and regional officials, with
significant popular support, in opposition to the officially
recognized Transitional Federal Government, dominated by
CIA-backed warlords. The ICU established its control over the vast
majority of the country, including the capital of Mogadishu,
expelling the warlords and establishing civil order, the
distribution of food and provision of basic services for the first
time in nearly 15 years.
Washington charged that the ICU was tied to Al Qaeda and was
harboring terrorists responsible for the 1998 bombings of American
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The ICU leaders denied both
charges.
In December of last year, some 50,000 Ethiopian troops, backed by
US Special Forces units and American air power, swept into Somalia
and deposed the ICU.
The subsequent 14 months of Ethiopian occupation have succeeded
only in provoking a growing popular insurgency that has deprived
the US-backed regime of effective control of virtually any part of
the country, including the capital, while unleashing the worst
humanitarian crisis on the African continent.
Mogadishu has turned into a ghost town, with the city’s residents
fleeing the violence and repression, and the majority living in
squalid camps outside the city. Fighting continues to rage in the
capital, while guerrilla forces loyal to the ICU have had
increasing success in overrunning towns in the south of the
country.
The principal motivation of the US missile strike Monday morning
was apparently the fact that these forces had established control
over Dobley, and one their senior leaders, Hassan Turki, (described
by Washington as a “financer of terrorism”), was believed to be
there.
Last month, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported, “There are up to two million
vulnerable people in need of assistance in the country. In the
capital Mogadishu, the number of people escaping the city to the
poorest areas of the Horn of Africa nation has doubled to 700,000
in the last six months.”
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), meanwhile, warned
that some 90,000 children face imminent threat of death from
malnutrition. In addition to hunger, the areas with a large
concentration of internally displaced persons are being ravaged by
cholera and other diseases.
Thousands have been killed by the Ethiopian occupation troops and
their Somali government allies. Many more have been arbitrarily
arrested.
The nature of the US-backed regime found clear expression Sunday
when hundreds of heavily armed government troops raided the
country’s three main radio stations—the country’s principal source
of news—beating and arresting staff members, destroying or
confiscating equipment and taking them off the air. Nine
journalists have been killed in the country in the past year and
scores have been forced into exile. The New York-based Committee
to Protect Journalists has ranked the country the second deadliest
for journalists, trailing only Iraq.
It is noteworthy that the missile attack on Somalia comes little
more than a week after Bush’s tour of Africa. In many ways,
Somalia represents a model for American strategy in the region,
based on the use of the armies of African regimes as surrogates,
aided and directed by US forces, to secure Washington’s interests.
This strategy has been developed since the US military was driven
out of Somalia in 1993 in the well-known “Black Hawk down”
incident, which claimed the lives of 19 American troops. It is now
being employed in alliance with some of the same warlords that the
US forces were fighting 15 years ago.
The aim of the White House and the Pentagon is to develop its new
African military command—Africom—to apply this same brutal
strategy throughout the continent in a bid to secure American
control of key oil and other natural resources and to beat back
the incursions of US capitalism’s increasingly important
competitor in the region, China.
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