Will Africa’s leaders say: ‘Yankee go home’?
FOLLOWING the assassination of General Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport by a US drone strike, the Iraq parliament passed a resolution to chase away all foreign forces out of Iraq.
This angered President Donald Trump so much. He threatened Iraq with sanctions and a bill for billions of dollars if the US was forced to withdraw its troops from Iraqi soil.
Officials in Iraq have since stepped back from threats to expel US forces after Trump threatened to impose sanctions.
The military spokesperson for the acting Iraq prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, said any withdrawal would involve only combat forces.
Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, say the removal of all US forces from the region is a central objective in the wake of Soleimani’s death.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One before Abdul Mahdi’s meeting with the US ambassador, Trump said: “If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it on a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before, ever. We have a very extraordinarily expensive airbase that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.”
Meanwhile, al-Shabaab militants launched a pre-dawn attack on Sunday on an airstrip used by US and Kenyan military forces on Kenya’s coast near the border with Somalia, killing one US service member and two American private contractors, according to a US military statement.
In the wake of the above statements by Trump, I would like to draw your attention to what is happening elsewhere on the African continent and to warn the people of Africa that there is a proliferation of Africom military camps in many countries. It is no secret that the US has for many years been setting up military bases on our beloved continent, invited or uninvited. From Djibouti, Ethiopia, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Kenya, Uganda, Central African Republic (CAR), DRC and Botswana, USA Africa Command is setting up bases in these countries.
The warning is that when the time comes for them to leave, they will refuse and demand that African countries should pay for those bases they have built. Alternatively, they may threaten our poor African countries with punitive sanctions.
Many of these deals are not underwritten by national parliaments; they are between the imperial US and their puppets in the form of corrupt individual African presidents who are paid money to make such decisions.
We are aware of some African leaders who are known to have been paid money to allow some Western countries to dump nuclear waste material in their countries without permission from the people.
This level of absurdity is displayed again in their dealings with Africom. Proof of this is in the details, a seemingly ceaseless string of projects, operations, and engagements.
Each mission, as Africom insists, may be relatively limited, but taken as a whole, US military operations are sweeping and expansive.
Evidence of an American pivot to Africa is almost everywhere on the continent. Unfortunately, very few governments, if any, on our continent have paid much notice.