US combat troops have been redeployed to Somalia, two years after President Donald Trump removed them. BBC. Trump pulled the troops out of Somalia due to the incompetence of Somalian President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed "Farmajo". Farmajo is no longer in charge. US troops will be used against al-Shabab as well as the much small ISIS affiliate. Al-Shabab is al-Qaeda's most dangerous and wealthy affiliate and boasts 12,000 troops. US troops will provide training as well as target al-Shabab leaders. In addition to the 500 US troops, dozens of other countries are assisting Somalia, leading to inefficiency.
My Comment:
This is an update to a previous post so I don't have too much more to add. I will repeat that I am extremely disappointed in this move. We have little interest in what happens in Somalia and though I agree that al-Shabab is a threat, we could deal with them without putting troops on the ground. Somalia seems like the perfect environment for our drone and air forces to attack militants.
What shocked me is that so many other countries are also training Somali soldiers. All of them are providing different training and different weapons and it is causing problems. Adding US assistance to this will make this problem even worse. Though many of our weapons and tactics are compatible with the NATO states that are helping, they aren't the only ones doing so. The gulf states are doing so as well and that is going to cause problems.
This partially explains why things have gone so bad in the fight against al-Shabab. Too many cooks in the kitchen. This has allowed them to be an extremely powerful terror group that can launch major attacks across the local region. They aren't a global threat by any means though and the ISIS fighters that are in Somalia are a joke.
What really gets me is that there was never any debate about this. Nobody ever questioned Joe Biden what his policy was in Somalia as foreign policy never seemed to come up in 2020. Nobody ever asked if the American people support Somalia or not. My guess is that most Americans are like me and want nothing to do with Somalia.
And again, we could have very easily had better results if we just relied on airstrikes and intelligence gathering. I don't think we should completely ignore Somalia, after all, we did that with Afghanistan back in the day and it didn't work out that well. But I don't see any need to deploy troops on the ground, especially when so many countries are already doing so.
No comments:
Post a Comment