America’s war on Islam in Somalia

Peace and stability is not acceptable to the U.S. if it has been fostered in by Islam, and what we see in Somalia today are the worst conditions have been in 16 years. The Ethiopians are now nothing but a proxy for the U.S. to ensure that peace never again returns to Somalia under the banner of Islam. It is in fact a war against the people to seek self determination as the Islamic Courts Union was and is a grass roots organization. There is something seriously wrong when the U.S. and Ethiopian backed interim government says it may build a fortified area like a “Baghdad-style “Green Zone” in the city to hide in.

When the Bush administration recently unveiled its new African military command— AFRICOM—Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Theresa Whelan said that the initiative was aimed at “promoting security, to build African capacity to build their own environments and not be subject to the instability that has toppled governments and caused so much pain on the continent.”

And yet hardly was the announcement made when the Bush administration organized the overthrow of the first stable government Somalia has had since 1991, stirring up a hornet’s nest of regional rivalries in the strategic Horn of Africa. U.S. Special Forces accompanied the Ethiopian Army when it stormed across the border in late December to support the besieged and isolated Transitional Federal Government. The United States also provided the Ethiopians with “up-to-date intelligence on the military positions of the Islamist fighters in Somalia,” Pentagon and counterterrorism officials told The New York Times.

The target of the invasion was the Islamic Courts Union, which over the past year had brought a modicum of peace to the warlord-riven country. Since the poorly armed ICU militias were routed, fighting in the capital, Mogadishu, sharply escalated. Nor have matters improved in recent months. “The situation here [Mogadishu] is out of control,” Ali Said Omar, chair of the Center for Peace and Democracy, told The Guardian in late February.

The ostensible reason for U.S. participation in the invasion was the ICU’s supposed association with al-Qaida, a charge that has never been substantiated. U.S. warplanes and ships shelled and rocketed parts of southern Somalia where, according to Oxfam and the United Nations Refugee Center, 70 civilians died and more than 100 were wounded.

Ethiopia denies firing on Somali civilians

Wednesday, 15 August, 2007, 01:33 AM Doha Time

MOGADISHU: Heavy fighting between Somali government forces backed by Ethiopian troops and insurgents in Mogadishu has killed at least 31 Somalis and wounded 60 in the past 24 hours, a human rights group said yesterday.

“The killings were from gunshots and explosions in different parts of the city,” said the head of Elman Human Rights Group, Sudani Ali Ahmed. “It is totally unacceptable and … against human rights.”

In one incident, Ethiopian soldiers opened fire on a bus full of civilians, killing 10 people and wounding several others, Ahmed said. “This was the most ugly attack,” Ahmed said. “Six people died instantly and another 14 were wounded, four of whom died.”

Ethiopia denied carrying out the bus attack.

“This is a baseless accusation, as usual,” Ethiopian Information Ministry spokesman Zemedhun Tekle said in Addis Ababa. “We would never open fire on civilians like this.”

A European Union security expert and UN arms monitors have both said Ethiopia carried out attacks on civilian targets in past anti-insurgent offensives in Mogadishu.

At a hospital near the scene of the attack, Deq Hayr Olad, 24, said he remembered the bus being sprayed with bullets, some of which hit him in the left leg.

“My wife was eight months pregnant,” he told Reuters, his leg swathed in bandages. “They both died.”

A Reuters reporter at the hospital saw wounded people streaming into the emergency room. In the hallway, a boy wafted a freshly taken X-ray of his uncle’s bullet wound in the air to dry it.

Felis Adan, an 8-year-old survivor of the bus attack, cried as she sat next to her wounded grandmother on a stretcher.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I saw people crying and screaming … then my grandmother was bleeding.”

As the violence in Mogadishu intensified, Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi said yesterday he was seeking to create a Baghdad-style “Green Zone” in the city to protect officials and foreign visitors from insurgent attacks.

Hundreds have been killed by mortar and rocket attacks and firefights in Mogadishu since Somalia’s Ethiopian-backed interim government ousted The Islamist in December. - Reuters