US seemingly facing new ‘endless war’ in Somalia

The Pentagon has been issuing near-daily announcements of new strikes against Islamic militants of al-Shabaab in Somalia, seemingly without affecting the al-Qaeda affiliate’s ability to destabilise the country, in what is looking like a new “endless war” for the US.

The Trump administration’s plans to reduce its military presence in Africa while re-centering its efforts towards two key strategic competitors — China and Russia — are coming at the expense of Frenchled operations against jihadists in the Sahel region.

So far, however, the war of attrition against the al-Shabaab has continued unabated.

The US Africa Command (Africom) on Friday announced an air strike on an al-Shabaab target near the town of Qunyo Barrow, in southern Somalia.

One al-Shabaab fighter was killed, the statement said.

It was the 20th strike against the Islamist insurgents by US forces in Somalia this year, after 64 strikes last year and 43 in 2018, according to data from the New America policy centre.

But al-Shabaab militants are estimated to number between 5,000 and 9,000, so even if US forces continued to eliminate one or two of their fighters every day, it could take years to kill them all — assuming that no replacements are recruited.

That makes it sound a lot like the sort of “endless war” that US President Donald Trump detests.

In a first public report on the US military operation in Somalia published in February, the Pentagon’s acting inspector-general, Glenn Fine, recalled that part of Africom’s stated mission is to ensure that by 2021, al-Shabaab, the Islamic State in Somalia and other terrorist groups have been sufficiently “degraded such that they cannot cause significant harm to US interests”.

But, Fine wrote, “despite continued US air strikes in Somalia and US assistance to African partner forces, alShabaab appears to be a growing threat that aspires to strike the US homeland”.

The inspector-general’s office operates independently within the Pentagon.

In fact, on January 5, alShabaab militants attacked a US-Kenyan military base in Lamu in southeastern Kenya near the border with Somalia, killing three Americans.

Earlier, on December 28, alShabaab fighters led one of the deadliest attacks of the decade in Somalia when a boobytrapped vehicle exploded at a busy checkpoint in the capital Mogadishu, killing 81 people.

Some US officials have expressed concern over the lack of tangible results in a war that many Americans know nothing of, a war waged largely by aerial drones and a small force of elite ground troops.

Amnesty International said in a 2019 report that some US air strikes had resulted in the deaths of farmers, workers and even children.

The group accused the US military of showing “appalling disregard for civilians”.