Up to sixty commandos of the UK’s elite Special Air Service (SAS) have invaded Somalia. In violation of the UN Charter, Britain’s Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, authorised the commandos to invade the country with the professed aims of quelling the al-Shabaab militia,¹ which is battling the UK-created and installed Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

This is an old British ploy: create a proxy militia, use it to wreck a country, and then send in the heavy artillery when it proves too incompetent to finish the job. In the late 1990s, the UK secret services backed the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army in order to beat the drums for war in Serbia. In 2010, the secret services began training and arming anti-Gaddafi elements (following a botched 1995-6 effort), using Gaddafi’s crackdowns as a pretext for NATO bombing. Ditto Syria.
 
The press reported that the SAS commandos in Somalia are collaborating with the Kenyan military—which Britain also trains and arms—on the Somalia-Kenya border. Not newsworthy, however, were the quarter of a million Somali refugees living in dire conditions in Kenyan camps, driven from Somalia in 2006-2009 by the scorched-earth tactics of the TFG: that is Britain’s terrorism, so it is unmentionable.²

Also unmentionable is the UK-Kenyan terrorism of SAS-backed air strikes on Somali refugee camps. Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said: “Kenya’s Somalia operation has resulted in apparent attacks on a camp for displaced people and a fishing boat.” On October 30 2011, the Kenyan Air Force, using British weapons and tactical training, bombed an internally displaced persons’ camp near Jilib, Somalia. Médecins Sans Frontières treated 45 wounded people, including 31 children, and confirmed that 5 civilians died as a result.³

Also unmentionable is the fact that the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which the TFG deposed in 2009 and from which al-Shabaab sprang, was a socialist, non-extremist government, according to US Congressional documents;⁴ that the ICU eliminated piracy (not with violence but with job creation);⁵ and that al-Shabaab’s core are MI6-MI5 double-agents, and British fighters in Somali were radicalised by MI5-MI6 agents like Haroon Rashid Aswat and Abu Qatada.⁶

Most unmentionable of all is that Somalis depend on piracy for survival, because EU vessels are illegally over-fishing their waters, according to unreported House of Lords documents;⁷ and that according to the Red Cross, nearly one million Somalis depend upon food aid: any increase in UK-led violence could starve hundreds of thousands of people.⁸

Notes

1. Dominik Lemanski, “SAS targets Somali terror forces,” Daily Star, 11 March, 2012.
   
   
2. For details and sources, see my “Somalia Still Suffers,” Z Magazine, July-August, 2010.
   
   
3. Human Rights Watch, “Kenya: Respect law in Somali military operations,” 19 November, 2011.
   
   
4. Ted Dagne, Somalia: Current Conditions and Prospects for a Lasting Peace, Congressional Research Service, Order Code RL33911, 12 March, 2007 (31 August 2011), p.15. 
   
   
5. Roger Middleton, “Piracy in Somalia: Threatening global trade, feeding local wars”, Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), Briefing paper, October, 2008.
   
   
6. See my, “The MI6-Al-Shabbab Connection”, Axis of Logic, 4 July, 2012.
   
   
7. House of Lords, Combating Somali Piracy: the EU’s Naval Operation Atalanta, European Union Committee, 12th Report of Session 2009–10, HL Paper 103, 14 April, 2010, London: Stationary Office.
   
   
8. Red Cross, “Somalia: food aid distributed to over 900,000 people”, No 11/04 16, December, 2011.