According to The Herald, Scotland’s independent daily newspaper, American security officials are providing clandestine support to the Somalian warlords who mutilated American soldiers in 1993. The American operation, which is in breach of the United Nations’ arms embargo on Somalia, is controlled, according to The Herald, through the U.S. Embassy in Kenya and through Washington’s Combined Joint Task Force in Djibouti, on Somalia’s northern border.
The article goes on to describe Somalia as having a weak transitional government; indeed, it is ruled by a group of competing warlords. The American response to this chaos, according to the article, is to turn to warlords as allies in the so-called war on terror.
In its latest edition, Africa Confidential, a London-based intelligence newsletter, reports that “CIA staff certainly helped to organise the [Somali warlord] Alliance, with, we hear, the involvement of at least one National Intelligence Support Group….If what is happening now in Somalia was happening in Latin America, it would be a new Iran-Contra scandal.”
According to The Herald, the U.S./Somalian warlord alliance has not resulted in the capture of any terrorists. The report states that arms have arrived from the United Arab Emerates, Ethiopia and Yemen.
