http://rt.com/usa/271369-us-secret-drones-somalia/?
Somalia is home to two secret US drone bases – report
Published time: July 03, 2015 00:19
Up to 120 US military personnel are operating out of two secret drone
bases in Somalia, carrying out attacks on Al-Shabab militants and
working with African Union peacekeepers, a new report has revealed.
Somali officials have confirmed a secretive US presence in the
southern port city of Kismayo, according to Foreign Policy
correspondent Ty McCormick. Another base, at the airfield of Baledogle
near Mogadishu, is being used for both drone strikes and for
contractors training Somali security forces.
Regional administration official Abdighani Abdi Jama told McCormick
that as many as 40 US personnel conduct “intelligence” and
“counterterrorism” operations and operate drones from their base at
Kismayo airport, about 300 miles south of Mogadishu. Somali officials
and sources within the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) also
indicated a similar presence at Baledogle, in the Lower Shebelle
region.
Washington has not officially admitted to operating drones from Somali
territory, with drone flights said to originate from US bases in the
neighboring Djibouti, and outposts in Kenya and Ethiopia. The US also
has an outpost in the Seychelles, an archipelago some 800 miles off
the Somali coast.
US Africa Command (AFRICOM) spokesman Chuck Prichard declined to
comment on the size or location of their units, saying only that the
“small number” of US Special Forces deployed the region was “not
tasked with directly engaging enemy forces.”
Read moreSomali terror suspect sought by FBI apprehended in Africa
“The exact nature of this support, weapons systems or number of
personnel involved in these operations cannot be disclosed in order to
protect the integrity of these operations and the safety of units in
the region,” Prichard wrote in an email to Foreign Policy.
US forces have conducted drone and helicopter attacks against
Al-Shabab since 2007. An American drone killed the group’s leader
Ahmed Abdi Godane in 2014.
On more than one occasion, US special operations teams have staged
their attacks from bases belonging to Kenyan and Ugandan forces within
AMISOM says McCormick, citing anonymous sources from within the
peacekeeping mission.
“They come to our forward operating bases and sometimes do joint
operations with us,” said one Ugandan source. “We often don’t get much
notice,” he added. “They don’t trust us, and we don’t trust them.”
Read moreRevealed: US operating secretly in Somalia since 2007
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalists, up to 105 people
may have been killed in US drone strikes in Somalia, of which there
have been no more than 13 since 2007. Most of them were not civilians.
Other covert operations killed between 40 and 141 people, with
civilians making seven to 47 of them.
Since 2007, Washington has spent almost $1 billion on funding AMISOM,
$500 million directly and another $455 million through the UN. That
has reportedly helped the African Union troops turn the tide against
Al-Shabab, reducing their control from 60 percent of Somalian
territory in 2010 to reportedly only 6 percent today.
According to Bronwyn Bruton, from the Atlantic Council’s Africa
Center, Al-Shabab has simply changed the way it operates and remains a
dangerous force to be reckoned with. “They are not actually
confronting AMISOM head-on anymore, which means that their forces and
weapons are mostly intact,”she told McCormick. “They have shifted from
a conventional force to a pure terrorist one that is increasingly
focusing its attention on attacks outside of Somalia, in Kenya, and
elsewhere in the region.”
Received on Fri Jul 03 2015 - 21:55:16 EDT