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| Africa Horn |
| CIA efforts in Somalia criticized |
| 2006-06-08 |
| A covert effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to finance Somali warlords has drawn sharp criticism from U.S. government officials who say the campaign has thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside Somalia and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize. The criticism, expressed privately, flared even before the apparent victory this week by Islamist militias in the country dealt a sharp setback to American policy in the region, according to U.S. government officials with direct knowledge of the debate. The officials said the CIA effort, run from the agency's station in Nairobi, Kenya, had channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past year to secular warlords inside Somalia with the aim, among other things, of capturing or killing a handful of suspected members of al Qaeda thought to be hiding there. Officials say the decision to use proxies was born in part from fears of committing large numbers of American personnel to counterterrorism efforts in Somalia, a country that the United States hastily left in 1994 after attempts to capture the warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid and his aides ended in disaster and the deaths of 18 American troops. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |