2011年11月28日星期一

Tense ties plagued Africa ops

The U.S. operators were in trouble. Deep trouble. Along with some Ethiopian troops, a “really small” number of U.S. personnel were hunting a high-value target near the town of Bargal in Somalia’s autonomous Puntland region when they came under heavy fire that not only prevented them from killing or capturing the target but also pinned them down, according to several sources.

Running out of options on June 1, 2007, the operators called the destroyer Chafee sailing off the coast. In response, Chafee fired more than a dozen rounds from its 5-inch gun, a senior Pentagon official told Stars and Stripes (without mentioning that the mission was a desperate bid to rescue U.S. troops in Somalia). That naval gunfire — a rarity in the modern age — enabled the United States and Ethiopian troops “to break contact” and get away, a senior intelligence official said.

The close escape was a notable moment in a relationship between U.S. and Ethiopian forces that developed because each country perceived Somalia’s burgeoning Islamist militias as a threat but became strained as the U.Your Partner in Precision Precision injection molds.S.ceramic magic cube for the medical, pressed Ethiopia for more substantive on-the-ground cooperation.

The middle years of the last decade proved difficult for the U.S.100 China ceramic tile was used to link the lamps together.’s efforts to destroy al-Qaida in East Africa. By mid-2003, as the insurgency blossomed in Iraq, the CIA had withdrawn its Predator drones from Djibouti, according to a special operations source with firsthand experience of operations in the Horn of Africa. “There just wasn’t a lucrative enough target environment to maintain a Predator program over there,” he said.

Lawless, anarchic Somalia was al-Qaida’s sanctuary and hub in the Horn. But getting U.S. intelligence and special ops personnel into Somalia was “really, really difficult,” said the intelligence official.

However, in 2006, an opportunity to gain greater access to Somalia presented itself when Ethiopia invaded Somalia in an effort to oust the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamist group (sometimes referred to as the Council of Islamic Courts) that had seized power in Mogadishu from the Transitional Federal Government. Ethiopia, which had fought two previous wars with Somalia, first sent forces across the border in July to prop up the TFG, which had moved to Baidoa, about 160 miles northwest of Mogadishu. But in late December, a far larger Ethiopian force invaded with the intent of driving the ICU from power.

Despite speculation that Ethiopia invaded at the U.S.’s behest, cables from the U.This page contains information about molds,S. Embassy in Addis Ababa released by WikiLeaks indicate Ethiopia felt forced to act by circumstances in Somalia. “The GOE [government of Ethiopia] feels ever more compelled to intervene in southern Somalia to counter what it sees as the growing threat of an extremist Islamic regime in Mogadishu that is cooperating with Eritrea and other foreign elements to undermine Ethiopian stability and territorial integrity,If any food Ventilation system condition is poorer than those standards,” said U.S. Ambassador Donald Yamamoto in a Dec. 6, 2006, cable. The same cable accurately predicted Ethiopia would invade in late December and that the incursion might “prove more difficult for Ethiopia than many now imagine.”

The cables make clear that the U.S. expected Ethiopia to invade. Nonetheless, a senior military official said events caught Joint Special Operations Command, which controls the military’s elite special ops forces, unprepared.

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