Meanwhile, the insurgents – made up of hard-core remnants of the
overthrown Islamist government, some tribal groups excluded by rivals
in the U.S.-backed warlord faction, and the usual mix of Somali
nationalists who object to having their country invaded and people
taking up arms to revenge the "collateral damage" murders of family
members – lashed back with increasing ferocity.
It is thought
that when the final death count is in, up a thousand people will have
been killed in the week's fighting, while tens of thousands of new
refugees have joined the more than 100,000 people fleeing the
Bush-backed destruction. Reports from Agence France Presse ("
Corpses
'rotting in Mogadishu streets'") and Reuters ("
Scores Killed in
Fighting in Mogadishu") paint a grim scene of despair and devastation:
AFP:
“Ethiopian forces are bombing down civilian sites, places where there
are no insurgents," Hussein Said Korgab, the spokesman for Mogadishu's
dominant Hawiye clan, said. "This morning, they have shelled places
some 15km away (from the city), and people are fleeing again.â€
...More
Ethiopian troops moved into Mogadishu to reinforce their colleagues a
day after a suspected suicide bomber attacked their base south of the
capital. The worsening situation in Mogadishu has led UN humanitarian
officials to warn of a looming disaster...The UN said Somali government
forces were blocking relief supplies and that UN aircraft were being
shot at. In Mogadishu, bodies were left lying in the streets, while a
cholera or diarrhea epidemic was taking hold and new flooding was
likely soon, it added.
Reuters: Shells pounded Mogadishu on
Saturday, killing at least 73 people to swell a death-toll already in
the hundreds from this week's battles pitting militias and Islamists
against Somali and Ethiopian troops.
The escalating war has also
sent more than 321,000 residents fleeing in the biggest refugee
movement in Somalia since the 1991 fall of a dictator ushered in 16
years of anarchy.
Even by Somali standards, Saturday's carnage
was shocking. "I counted 20 dead in the street and the sidewalk. Some
were missing heads, others were so mutilated you couldn't tell if they
were men or women,'' resident Suleman Mohammed said from the Al Barakah
market area where more than seven mortars landed. Residents and medical
staff interviewed by Reuters confirmed a minimum of 73 casualties from
the incessant shelling and gunfire across the city on Saturday, adding
to an estimated 131 others from the previous three days' violence.
The
week's final death-toll is expected to soar and may come close to the
estimated 1,000 casualties from a similar four-day flare-up at the end
of March. Most of the victims are civilians...
"We are in a
state of shock, I see no end to this,'' said Ali Haji, 50, a resident
who took his family out of Mogadishu last month but came back to
protect his house and belongings. "I've had enough. I'm abandoning the
house. I am caught between two groups -- Ethiopians trying to kill me
because I am Somali, and insurgents not happy because I am not picking
up a gun and fighting with them. I have lost all hope.''
...The
only operating hospital, Madina, was packed with wounded, screams
echoing through the corridors. Tents were set up in the hospital garden
to deal with the influx, with many people nursing injuries unattended
under trees in the heat. "Unless we get massive international help, we
cannot cope,'' a doctor said."Our beds and tents are full.''
Why
has Somalia been blessed by this inclusion in Bush's Terror War? Why
else? Oil. One of our astute commentators, "b real," picked up on this
little-noticed
story from Dow Jones a couple of weeks ago. (It's a
cliché, but true: if you want to know what's really going on in the
world, ignore the Beltway blather and head to the business pages; the
money-spinners need to deal with reality, not spin, if they want to keep
their coffers full.) Dow Jones noted that Somalia's new, Bush-installed
prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, is now pushing an
Iraqi-style "oil
law" that will give the Bushist oil barons and their global cronies
control of Somalia's unexploited oil fields, through the usual
"production sharing agreement" that guarantees decades of fat profits
for foreign companies while starving the natives of their patrimony:
Somalian
Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi hopes big oil companies will return to
the country and said parliament is set to vote on a petroleum law to
encourage this by providing a legal framework. Gedi told Dow Jones
Newswires last week: "The parliament will approve the law within two
months." Large oil companies were awarded acreage before the country's
government collapsed in 1991 but have yet to return owing to years of
political instability and violence.
Bush's war aims in
Somalia are the same as elsewhere in his Terror War: securing the
control (or dominating influence) over the world's oil supplies and its
distribution networks, with the concomitant political and financial
dominance this guarantees on a wider scale. We've touched lightly on
some of this context for the Somalia take-down in previous pieces (
such
as here), but b real has provided copious documentation of just what
the Bushists are up to, not only in Somalia itself but throughout the
Horn of Africa, in this series at Moon of Alabama: "
Understanding
AFRICOM" (the latter being the new proconsular command that Bush has
established to extend American military sway over Africa).
In
one passage of the series, b real notes the early and extensive
involvement of the Bush Regime with the Ethiopian dictatorship, and
again notes the oil connection which is being made explicitly by
Somalia's new leaders:
Investigative reporter Keith Harmon Snow, in an article from 2004, wrote of training camps in Ethiopia:
In
2003, the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division (Special Operations
Forces) completed a three-month program to train an Ethiopian army
division in counter-terrorism tactics. Operations are coordinated
through the Combined Joint Task Forces-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) base
in Djibouti. In January 2004, Special Operations soldiers from the 3rd
U.S. Infantry Regiment replaced the 10th Mountain Division forces at a
new Hurso Training Camp, northwest of Dire Dawa near the border with
Somalia, to be used for launching local joint missions in
"counter-terrorism" with the Ethiopian military. Soldiers will continue
to operate missions out of Hurso for several months from a new forward
base names "Camp United." From April 12-25, 2003, under the U.S. State
Department-sponsored Africa Contingency Operations Training and
Assistance Program, CJTF-HOA provided instruction to nearly 900
Ethiopian soldiers at a base in Legedadi. CJTF-HOA forces from the U.S.
Army's 478th Civil Affairs Battalion also operated in Ethiopia in 2003
in and around Dire Dawa, Galadi, and Dolo Odo, among other areas.
The
December 2006 invasion of Somalia was coordinated using these and other
bases throughout the region. While efforts to replace the popular
Islamic Courts Union in Somalia with the warlord-led Transitional
Federal Government (TFG) appear to be failing, the arrival of AFRICOM
may bring more boots on the ground into that unstable, geostrategic
nation. Especially now that TFG spokesman Abdirahman Dinari has dangled
a carrot before foreign investors: "Somalia has a lot of oil, and our
ministers have just approved a key exploration law to regulate how
concessions are given out.... But what we need now is international
support to restore security and build our nation, and we will be noting
who helps us and who doesn't when these decisions are taken."
The
draconian, torture-inflicting Ethiopian dictatorship has been plied
with weapons, money, training, intelligence and diplomatic support by
George W. Bush -- in much the same way that
his father serviced Saddam
Hussein 20 years ago. Bush has even gone so far as to allow Ethiopia to
receive vast quantities of arms from North Korea -- thus providing that
regime with desperately needed hard currency to prop up its own
dictatorship and advance its nuclear proliferation programs; again, a
precise echo of Bush I's dealings with Saddam. Although in Somalia,
unlike Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush has opted to work largely through
these proxies, committing no overt U.S. ground troops to the invasion,
the plain fact is that it is his green light that has made this happen.
It simply beggars belief to think that his pet dictator in Ethiopia
would have launched this invasion if Bush had told him not to. But of
course, as b real noted, Americans were an integral part of the
invasion planning -- and as we've often noted here, Americans have
taken a leading role in some of the most sinister elements of invasion
aftermath:
the killing of civilian refugees fleeing the fighting, and
the
"rendering" of civilians into the
torture chambers of Ethiopian
prisons.
I want to reiterate a point that I have made over and
over here: This war in Somalia,
this carnage, this mass death, this
brutality, this
vast suffering is the direct result of the Bush
Administration's "War on Terror." For all you Americans out there, this
is our war, just as much as Afghanistan and Iraq are. It's being done
in our name, with our money, at the instigation of our leaders. The
American Establishment and the American media are almost totally
ignoring this on-going horror story -- and downplaying the Bush gang's
central role in it whenever it does get a mention -- but be assured:
just because American citizens have been left in the usual amnesiac fog
by their leaders, the victims of the invasion, and those watching it
from outside the American media bubble -- especially in the Muslim
world -- know full well whose war it really is. Once again, the brutal
policies of loot and domination are preparing a terrible blowback for
us; even now, you can see the thunderclouds gathering on the horizon.
As sure as night follows day, when George W. Bush backs a "regime change" invasion of a country, you will see headlines like this: "Corpses Rotting in the Streets." We see it every day in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we are seeing it again in Somalia – 
