The administration of US President Barack Obama has decided to bolster efforts to support Somalia’s embattled transitional government by providing money for weapons and helping the military in neighboring Djibouti train Somali forces, US officials said on Thursday.
The goal is to stem Islamic insurgent advances in the Horn of Africa, but the plan would commit the US to a greater embrace of a shaky government in one of the world’s most chaotic states.
An administration review of US policy toward Somalia found an urgent need to supply the Somali government with ammunition and weapons as it struggles to confront increasingly powerful Islamic militants.
Alarmed by terrorists’ gains in Somalia, the administration decided it needed to do more to support Somalia’s transitional federal government, officials said.
Officials said US troops would not conduct the training, and the US military would not be in Somalia. Washington would provide logistical support for the training and arms to the Somalis.
The US officials spoke about the emerging plan on condition of anonymity because the details have not yet been completed.
Even with the administration’s careful effort not to leave an American footprint in a country wracked by violent upheaval, the move amounts to a budding foreign complication for the US as its own armed forces wage two distant wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The effort to bolster Somalia’s tattered military and police forces faces heavy odds. Somalia, which has been in chaos for nearly 20 years, controls only a few blocks of the capital and comes under regular attack from increasingly powerful Islamic insurgents.
US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said on Thursday the administration was concerned about the unrest in Somalia.
Kelly confirmed that the US organized an arms shipment made to the Somali government this month but did not confirm the plans to train Somali forces in Djibouti. One official said the shipment was ammunition delivered to Mogadishu. The Washington Post first reported the arms shipment on Thursday.
The “threat to the government is causing real suffering,” Kelly said. “This kind of violence is causing real suffering for the Somalian people, and it’s just prolonging the chaos and preventing the country from getting on stable footing. So, yes, we are concerned.”
On Thursday, Idd Beddel Mohamed, Somalia’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, said that the planned US effort represented a “new window of opportunity in which the two countries can coordinate strategy for peace and stability.”
He said Somalia welcomed US help in establishing his country’s security forces, which he said would include US$10 million in financial aid for the forces.
Mohamed and other top leaders from the country told the US House of Representatives Foreign Relations subcommittee on Africa that their country needed funding to promote economic development, strengthen their Coast Guard to battle piracy and resolve humanitarian crises as people flee the violence.
But Abdirahman Mohamed Mohamud, president of the state of Puntland, warned that while the US could play a leading role in political and economic assistance, “this does not and should not involve direct military intervention.”
Puntland is a more stable semiautonomous region in northeastern Somalia.
Warlords and Islamic al-Shabab militants control the countryside, which has become a growing base for al-Qaeda terrorists arriving from Yemen and South Asia, US officials have said.
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