It’s my simple assertion that the recent attacks in Nairobi are yet again another reaction that are tied to a disastrous western foreign policy in Africa, where violence simply begets violence.
What’s so fascinating about the reporting on the reactions to the War OF Terror, is the way almost all of it ignores history, as if it is a conflict happening in another time.
The recent attacks in Kenya are a case in point. In the wake of this tragic event, we have been deluged by a wave of terror experts that warn us about yet another dark mediaeval movement that harbours incomprehensible fanatics who want to destroy the West.
In our simplified media, with its sound bite driven propaganda culture, little to no context is given as to why people resort to such violent acts.
But it’s only when you start looking into “the West’s” foreign policy in East Africa over the last twenty years, that you can begin to form the context into which you can build a truer and fuller construct around.
This is yet again another reaction tied to a disastrous western foreign policy.
In the early 2000′s, the Bush administration made a disastrous decision to put all these warlords on the CIA payroll, they named them the “Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter Terrorism” in Somalia and Kenya.
This group was used as an assassination squad.
Most terrorism experts said there were no more than a dozen individuals linked to Al-Qaeda in Somalia after 9/11.
So the CIA hires these warlords to ostensibly hunt these people down, but instead they end up murdering vast numbers of people who were Imams or religious scholars, and in some cases they would literally chop people’s heads off and bring them to their American CIA liaisons, saying “this is so and so and I’ve killed them”.
What you had was an utterly ruthless and thuggish collection of CIA sponsored warlords murdering people at the behest of the CIA.
These actions sparked a revolt against the warlords, with coalitions of religious figures across Somalia forming “The Islamic Courts Union”, which consisted of twelve regional sharia based courts that had imposed law and order in their own respective areas, coming together to form one united body, pooling their resources to overthrow the CIA warlords in Mogadishu.
When the Islamic Courts Union took Mogadishu, overthrowing the CIA backed warlords, they in turn imposed a brutal but effective form of governance in Mogadishu. Effective in the sense that it stabilised the city, crime rates plummeted and they reopened the ports.
Almost everyone apart from the Bush era administration would agree that it was the only moment since Siad Barre’s regime fell in 1991 that there had been anything resembling stability in Mogadishu. The CIA had been kicked out and the Islamic Courts Union was in control.
The US then partners with the Ethiopian dictatorship and Ethiopia launches an overt invasion into Somalia to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union.
Once the proxy war had succeeded, JSOC, America’s Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA use the cover of this overt invasion to go in and start hunting down and assassinating the leaders of the Islamic Courts Union.
The Islamic Courts Union is totally destroyed and Somalia returns to a state of lawlessness, brutality and civil war, coupled with the fact you now have American backed Ethiopians who are committing rape, murdering civilians, torturing people, setting up their own prison camps and rendering people back to Ethiopia.
In the midst of all this, a group of no bodies called Al-Shabaab, say ‘We will be the vanguard against the US backed Ethiopians, we will take up arms and we will defend Somalia, mixing the rhetoric of Bin Laden and Somali nationalism.’
The simple point is this, groups such as Al-Shabaab were non-players in Somalia, and it’s the American backed warlords and the overthrowing of local governments, such as the Islamic Courts Union, which ends up creating the very force that the Americans claim they were trying to fight in the first place.
A deadly self-fulfilling prophecy, where violence begets violence.
Since this was first written, America launched co-ordinated raids in both Libya and Somalia to grab so called “highly prized assets”. What isn’t known is how many civilians were killed in these raids and what kind of further resentment this will build from the children of those men and women killed in years to come. This won’t garner many column inches in the mainstream media.
As violence begets violence, you can expect this cyclical scenario to continue, just don’t fool yourself into believing that people carry out such acts without a reason.
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