Somalia: The Forgotten Front of the War on Terror - by Stephen Smith - Antiwar.com

Somalia: The Forgotten Front of the War on Terror - by Stephen Smith - Antiwar.com: "The Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which was never applicable to most Somalis, is close to losing the few blocks in Mogadishu that it still controls, and the radical Islamists who go by the name al-Shabaab are on the verge of taking control of the parts of Somalia that haven't already seceded. The civilian death toll since the American-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006 has reached 16,000, which makes the per capita annual civilian death rate in Somalia higher than that of Iraq since the American invasion in 2003. So it would seem be an appropriate time to reflect on American policy in Somalia.
Though the history of foreign intervention in Somalia goes back to colonial times and was especially detrimental during the Cold War-era Siad Barre regime, the most relevant starting point is the late 1980s, when Barre was losing his grip on Somalia, which was descending into a mix of anarchy and warlordism. The United States, unable to conceive of a people existing without a central state, intervened throughout the 1990s under the guise of various UN missions. The results were of course disastrous: hundreds of thousands of Somalis lost their lives in the ensuing civil war and resulting mass starvation. Americans were briefly aware of their government's actions in Somalia during the first major intervention in the early 1990s, when the grisly aftermath of the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 portrayed in Black Hawk Down brought Somalia into the American political consciousness, but the relatively minor scale of the war and lack of obvious U.S. interests conspired to keep most Americans ignorant of the role their government played in prolonging the violence in Somalia."