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MOGADISHU, Somalia On the front lines of Mogadishu's streets, Islamist militants battle African Union troops. Standing alongside the peacekeepers are members of an American-run team of advisers, former military men who play a little-known but key role in the war against al-Shabab.
Aside from covert raids by special operations forces, the U.S. government has not been involved militarily in Somalia since the intervention almost two decades ago that culminated in the Black Hawk Down battle. But a Washington-based company has been quietly working in one of the world's most dangerous cities to help an AU peacekeeping force protect the Somali government from al-Qaida-linked Islamist insurgents.
While troops struggle to get control of this shattered capital that has been filling with refugees fleeing famine in southern Somalia, The Associated Press got rare access to the military advisers, providing a first look into their work.
The men employed by Bancroft Global Development live in small trailers near Mogadishu's airport but often go into the field. It's dangerous work two Bancroft men were wounded last month.
Among the advisers are a retired general from the British marines, an ex-French soldier involved in a coup in Comoros 16 years ago, and a Danish political scientist.
Funded by the United Nations and the U.S. State Department, Bancroft has provided training in a range of military services, from bomb disposal and sniper training to handing out police uniforms.
Michael C. Stock, the American head of Bancroft, said his men share information with the FBI about bomb materials and the DNA of suicide bombers, who sometimes turned out to be Somali-American youths from the Midwest. Stock said his company receives no recompense for sharing information with the FBI.
Stock strongly objects if "mercenary" is used to describe his men. Instead he describes Bancroft as a non-governmental organization dedicated to finding permanent solutions to violent conflict. His men say they are trying to stabilize a country ravaged by 20 years of civil war and now a famine estimated to have killed 29,000 children in the past three months.
"We take calculated risks to be side by side with our protegees," said Stock, who visits Mogadishu only intermittently and for short periods of time, believing it is best not to have Americans working in Mogadishu. "It gives us credibility with them. They know we know what we are talking about."
At their beach-side camp in Mogadishu, diplomats, journalists and aid workers swap tip-offs by the bar. Stories fly through the air faster than the bats that hunt in the shadows, a way to unwind after a day of tense work.
MOGADISHU, Somalia Richard Rouget, a gun for hire over two decades of bloody African conflict, is the unlikely face of the American campaign against militants in Somalia.
A husky former French Army officer, Mr. Rouget, 51, commanded a group of foreign fighters during Ivory Coasts civil war in 2003, was convicted by a South African court of selling his military services and did a stint in the presidential guard of the Comoros Islands, an archipelago plagued by political tumult and coup attempts.
Now Mr. Rouget works for Bancroft Global Development, an American private security company that the State Department has indirectly financed to train African troops who have fought a pitched urban battle in the ruins of this city against the Shabab, the Somali militant group allied with Al Qaeda.
The company plays a vital part in the conflict now raging inside Somalia, a country that has been effectively ungoverned and mired in chaos for years. The fight against the Shabab, a group that United States officials fear could someday carry out strikes against the West, has mostly been outsourced to African soldiers and private companies out of reluctance to send American troops back into a country they hastily exited nearly two decades ago.
We do not want an American footprint or boot on the ground, said Johnnie Carson, the Obama administrations top State Department official for Africa.
A visible United States military presence would be provocative, he said, partly because of Somalias history as a graveyard for American missions including the Black Hawk Down episode in 1993, when Somali militiamen killed 18 American service members.
Still, over the past year, the United States has quietly stepped up operations inside Somalia, American officials acknowledge. The Central Intelligence Agency, which largely finances the countrys spy agency, has covertly trained Somali intelligence operatives, helped build a large base at Mogadishus airport Somalis call it the Pink House for the reddish hue of its buildings or Guantánamo for its ties to the United States and carried out joint interrogations of suspected terrorists with their counterparts in a ramshackle Somali prison.
The Pentagon has turned to strikes by armed drone aircraft to kill Shabab militants and recently approved $45 million in arms shipments to African troops fighting in Somalia.
But this is a piecemeal approach that many American officials believe will not be enough to suppress the Shabab over the long run. In interviews, more than a dozen current and former United States officials and experts described an overall American strategy in Somalia that has been troubled by a lack of focus and internal battles over the past decade. While the United States has significantly stepped up clandestine operations in Pakistan and Yemen, American officials are deeply worried about Somalia but cannot agree on the risks versus the rewards of escalating military strikes here.
I think that neither the international community in general nor the U.S. government in particular really knows what to do with the failure of the political process in Somalia, said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa program at the Atlantic Council, a Washington research institution.
For months, officials said, the State Department has been at odds with some military and intelligence officials about whether striking sites suspected of being militant camps in Somalias southern territories or carrying out American commando raids to kill militant leaders would significantly weaken the Shabab or instead bolster its ranks by allowing the group to present itself as the underdog against a foreign power.
Lauren Ploch, an East Africa expert at the Congressional Research Service, said that the Obama administration was confronted with many of the same problems that had vexed its predecessors balancing the risks of an on-the-ground presence against the risks of using third parties to carry out the American strategy in Somalia.
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah made the announcement at a community forum in Minneapolis. He said $10 million of the latest allocation will be devoted to the needs of people in Somalia. Prior to this latest allocation, the United States had pledged about $580 million to feed the hungry and ease suffering in the region. An estimated 4.6 million people in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia benefit from U.S. assistance. The worst drought in 60 years and ensuing agricultural failures have been major factors in causing the food crisis in the region.
For the people of Somalia, ongoing violence and the activity of the al-Shabaab terrorist group have worsened conditions and escalated a crisis into famine in six districts. Famine is expected to spread more widely through southern Somalia in the weeks to come, according to one recent assessment. The food shortages in Somalia began in early 2011, but al-Shabaab barred international humanitarian assistance workers from entering territory it controlled and refused shipments of food.
An estimated 12.4 million people in eastern Africa are at risk of malnutrition. People have responded to deprivation with their feet, leaving their villages and heading to refugee camps on Somalia's borders. Ethiopia and Kenya host the camps even while their domestic populations also suffer from hunger and malnutrition. USAID's Shah also told the Minneapolis forum, organized by U.S. Representative Keith Ellison, that the United States is committed to relieving the crisis of the current moment, but also to helping the region develop better agricultural practices to break a recurring pattern of food shortages. The Obama administration has developed a program called Feed the Future, which seeks to create greater food security in the region through better agricultural skills, techniques and infrastructure development.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a high-profile advocate of Feed the Future. Describing the program in August to a Washington audience, Clinton said the plan is designed to help farmers at the local level, but it also calls on governments to adopt new policies on a national level. "They need to move toward free trade in grain imports and exports," Clinton said. "They need to improve credit and land-use policies to support farmers and herders. They need to ensure that public grain reserves are available when shortages loom. And they need to welcome new technologies to bolster drought tolerance, disease resistance and crop yields."
allAfrica.com: East Africa: U.S. Pledge to Horn of Africa Hunger Tops $600 Million
US comes through with famine relief...
East Africa: US Pledge to Horn of Africa Hunger Tops $600 Million
1 September 2011 Washington - The US funding commitment to alleviate the massive humanitarian disaster in the Horn of Africa has passed the $600 million mark after a top aid official announced a $23 million increase August 31.
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah made the announcement at a community forum in Minneapolis. He said $10 million of the latest allocation will be devoted to the needs of people in Somalia. Prior to this latest allocation, the United States had pledged about $580 million to feed the hungry and ease suffering in the region. An estimated 4.6 million people in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia benefit from U.S. assistance. The worst drought in 60 years and ensuing agricultural failures have been major factors in causing the food crisis in the region.
For the people of Somalia, ongoing violence and the activity of the al-Shabaab terrorist group have worsened conditions and escalated a crisis into famine in six districts. Famine is expected to spread more widely through southern Somalia in the weeks to come, according to one recent assessment. The food shortages in Somalia began in early 2011, but al-Shabaab barred international humanitarian assistance workers from entering territory it controlled and refused shipments of food.
An estimated 12.4 million people in eastern Africa are at risk of malnutrition. People have responded to deprivation with their feet, leaving their villages and heading to refugee camps on Somalia's borders. Ethiopia and Kenya host the camps even while their domestic populations also suffer from hunger and malnutrition. USAID's Shah also told the Minneapolis forum, organized by U.S. Representative Keith Ellison, that the United States is committed to relieving the crisis of the current moment, but also to helping the region develop better agricultural practices to break a recurring pattern of food shortages. The Obama administration has developed a program called Feed the Future, which seeks to create greater food security in the region through better agricultural skills, techniques and infrastructure development.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a high-profile advocate of Feed the Future. Describing the program in August to a Washington audience, Clinton said the plan is designed to help farmers at the local level, but it also calls on governments to adopt new policies on a national level. "They need to move toward free trade in grain imports and exports," Clinton said. "They need to improve credit and land-use policies to support farmers and herders. They need to ensure that public grain reserves are available when shortages loom. And they need to welcome new technologies to bolster drought tolerance, disease resistance and crop yields."
allAfrica.com: East Africa: U.S. Pledge to Horn of Africa Hunger Tops $600 Million
Not sure how I feel about this.
Bancroft Global Development, U.S. Group, Advises African Troops In Somalia
MOGADISHU, Somalia — On the front lines of Mogadishu's streets, Islamist militants battle African Union troops. Standing alongside the peacekeepers are members of an American-run team of advisers, former military men who play a little-known but key role in the war against al-Shabab.
Aside from covert raids by special operations forces, the U.S. government has not been involved militarily in Somalia since the intervention almost two decades ago that culminated in the Black Hawk Down battle. But a Washington-based company has been quietly working in one of the world's most dangerous cities to help an AU peacekeeping force protect the Somali government from al-Qaida-linked Islamist insurgents.
While troops struggle to get control of this shattered capital that has been filling with refugees fleeing famine in southern Somalia, The Associated Press got rare access to the military advisers, providing a first look into their work.
The men employed by Bancroft Global Development live in small trailers near Mogadishu's airport but often go into the field. It's dangerous work – two Bancroft men were wounded last month.
Among the advisers are a retired general from the British marines, an ex-French soldier involved in a coup in Comoros 16 years ago, and a Danish political scientist.
Funded by the United Nations and the U.S. State Department, Bancroft has provided training in a range of military services, from bomb disposal and sniper training to handing out police uniforms.
Michael C. Stock, the American head of Bancroft, said his men share information with the FBI about bomb materials and the DNA of suicide bombers, who sometimes turned out to be Somali-American youths from the Midwest. Stock said his company receives no recompense for sharing information with the FBI.
Stock strongly objects if "mercenary" is used to describe his men. Instead he describes Bancroft as a non-governmental organization dedicated to finding permanent solutions to violent conflict. His men say they are trying to stabilize a country ravaged by 20 years of civil war and now a famine estimated to have killed 29,000 children in the past three months.
"We take calculated risks to be side by side with our protegees," said Stock, who visits Mogadishu only intermittently and for short periods of time, believing it is best not to have Americans working in Mogadishu. "It gives us credibility with them. They know we know what we are talking about."
At their beach-side camp in Mogadishu, diplomats, journalists and aid workers swap tip-offs by the bar. Stories fly through the air faster than the bats that hunt in the shadows, a way to unwind after a day of tense work.
Bancroft Global Development, U.S. Group, Advises African Troops In Somalia
Not sure how I feel about this.
Bancroft Global Development, U.S. Group, Advises African Troops In Somalia
MOGADISHU, Somalia On the front lines of Mogadishu's streets, Islamist militants battle African Union troops. Standing alongside the peacekeepers are members of an American-run team of advisers, former military men who play a little-known but key role in the war against al-Shabab.
Aside from covert raids by special operations forces, the U.S. government has not been involved militarily in Somalia since the intervention almost two decades ago that culminated in the Black Hawk Down battle. But a Washington-based company has been quietly working in one of the world's most dangerous cities to help an AU peacekeeping force protect the Somali government from al-Qaida-linked Islamist insurgents.
While troops struggle to get control of this shattered capital that has been filling with refugees fleeing famine in southern Somalia, The Associated Press got rare access to the military advisers, providing a first look into their work.
The men employed by Bancroft Global Development live in small trailers near Mogadishu's airport but often go into the field. It's dangerous work two Bancroft men were wounded last month.
Among the advisers are a retired general from the British marines, an ex-French soldier involved in a coup in Comoros 16 years ago, and a Danish political scientist.
Funded by the United Nations and the U.S. State Department, Bancroft has provided training in a range of military services, from bomb disposal and sniper training to handing out police uniforms.
Michael C. Stock, the American head of Bancroft, said his men share information with the FBI about bomb materials and the DNA of suicide bombers, who sometimes turned out to be Somali-American youths from the Midwest. Stock said his company receives no recompense for sharing information with the FBI.
Stock strongly objects if "mercenary" is used to describe his men. Instead he describes Bancroft as a non-governmental organization dedicated to finding permanent solutions to violent conflict. His men say they are trying to stabilize a country ravaged by 20 years of civil war and now a famine estimated to have killed 29,000 children in the past three months.
"We take calculated risks to be side by side with our protegees," said Stock, who visits Mogadishu only intermittently and for short periods of time, believing it is best not to have Americans working in Mogadishu. "It gives us credibility with them. They know we know what we are talking about."
At their beach-side camp in Mogadishu, diplomats, journalists and aid workers swap tip-offs by the bar. Stories fly through the air faster than the bats that hunt in the shadows, a way to unwind after a day of tense work.
Bancroft Global Development, U.S. Group, Advises African Troops In Somalia
US troops are there in Somalia to look for weak links to recruit as US' Al Qaeda as usual. "You can fool for some people sometimes, but you can't fool all the people all of the time."
While Moammar Gadhafi is gone, the weapons used by the rebels who overthrew him are now a threat to the whole region, according to Amanda Dory, a top Defense Department policy official on Africa. "The breakdown of security in Libya has generated a significant flow of militants and weapons and has decreased legitimate cross-border traffic at a time of great economic fragility and turbulence," said Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense on African affairs.
Many of those weapons, the Pentagon fears, are ending up with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) the branch of the terrorist network in North Africa, especially in Mali, which in recent months has seen a coup and a separatist effort. The al Qaeda affiliate "continues to increase its activities, including collecting large sums of money through kidnapping for ransom schemes," Dory said Monday. The Department of Defense "is closely watching what this will mean for the stability of the region and the ability of AQIM to target partner and U.S. interests."
Beyond Libya and Mali, the Defense Department is also active in the effort to hunt down the Lord's Resistance Army, a group that's been terrorizing central Africa and has for years kidnapped children and turned them into soldiers. "Regional governments clearly have the lead in the effort to counter" the Lord's Resistance Army, Dory said. "They're the ones who are ultimately responsible for ending the LRA threat and protecting local communities. And the United States is seeking to help them in these responsibilities." Some 100 U.S. troops, mostly Special Forces, are in Africa working to stop the LRA.
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