Yankee imperialism has been launching a series of unprecedented bombardments against Somalia for two years, under the rhetoric of "combating terrorism". Last year there were more than 31 attacks, according to what was estimated by the United States Command for Africa (Africom) in October of this year. By November 22, the British imperialism’s media The Guardian and other media announced the mark of 33 attacks.
According to The Guardian itself, the attacks represent a grave danger to the civilian population and have failed the goal of destroying the Islamic armed groups that wage armed struggle against the invading foreign forces - coordinated by Yankee imperialism, through the "African Union”.
Of the total number of attacks in 2018, 29 were directed against Al Shabaab ("Combatant Youth Movement"), an organization that, despite its reactionary ideology, has been the main force of the National Resistance.
Researchers at the Hiraal Institute, a partner of the lackey government of Mogadishu (the capital of Somali), indicate that although Al Shabaab offensives against the occupying forces of African Union have declined there has been an increase in attacks on the political-administrative apparatus of the State. According to them, this indicates a strengthening of the organization in the territories under their control.
'IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO DEFEAT THEM' WITHOUT REMOVING THE FOREIGN TROOPS
Officials of the lackey government, such as Hussein Sheik Ali (former head of the counter-intelligence of the old Somali state and current president of the Hiraal Institute), already recognize that it is not possible to militarily defeat Al Shabaab. On October 14, 2018, Ali told The Guardian that "We have to negotiate with Al Shabaab". He also admitted that it is necessary for the Yankee air strikes to cease and that African Union troops be withdrawn so that one can, in his words, "bring stability" to Somalia.
The military intervention in Somalia by the African Union is directly coordinated by Africom - ie the USA - and aims to seize control of the vast territories that are now controlled by various Islamic armed groups, such as Al Shabaab. What was developing as a struggle between various power groups and fractions of the ruling classes - which Al Shabaab is part of, having a semi-feudal latifundium economic base - began to develop as a national resistance war when the nation was invaded by its neighbors, especially by Ethiopia, with the justification that the situation in Somalia was threatening the security of that country. Since then, the African Union has also intervened on the country - since such chaos in the region is a problem for imperialism, who demands some stability for the operation of the super-exploitation carried out by its monopolies.
Al-Shabaab, which emerged after decades of struggle by the Somali people against imperialism (including against the social-imperialism of the Soviet Union), has a reactionary ideology that is essentially religious with a considerable bias for the preservation of the Islamic and African territory of its country. Born as a young, radical wing of the Islamic Counsil (Shura) - the organizer of the resistance against the Ethiopian military intervention in Somalia in the first decade of the 2000s - the movement then made a religious oath of loyalty similar to Western vassalage to Al Qaeda. Al Shabaab today is also notorious for having considerable peasant support.
In 2014, the Al Jazeera news agency reported that Somalia's ravaged and famished peasant economy was being saved by the expulsion of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) from the territories controlled by Al Shabaab. "NGOs were buying food from outside and never from us, local producers," a peasant told the Qatar news agency at the time.
Al-Shabaab, in accordance with the article of 2014, also organized so-called "anti-NGO projects", which included the "National Meal" which consisted of popular-priced restaurants to drain local peasant production, as well as building irrigation. The infiltration of NGOs by "Western intelligence agencies" into Somali territory is also one of the motives cited by Al Jazeera for the expulsion of these so-called "humanitarian groups" by Al Shabaab.
Translated from A Nova Democracia
