Somalia, a US War 'Nobody is Watching'

[unhappycamper]

Somalia, a US War 'Nobody is Watching'
November 25, 2008
Chicago Tribune

To glimpse America's secret war in Africa, you must bang with a rock on the iron gate of the prison in this remote port in northern Somalia. A sleepy guard will yank open a rusty deadbolt. Then, you ask to speak to an inmate named Mohamed Ali Isse.

Isse, 36, is a convicted murderer and jihadist. He is known among his fellow prisoners, with grudging awe, as "The Man with the American Thing in His Leg."

That "thing" is a stainless steel surgical pin screwed into his bullet-shattered femur, courtesy, he says, of the U.S. Navy. How it got there -- or more to the point, how Isse ended up in this crumbling, stone-walled hellhole at the uttermost end of the Earth -- is a story that the U.S. government probably would prefer to remain untold.

That's because Isse and his fancy surgery scars offer what little tangible evidence exists of a bare-knuckled war that has been waged silently, over the past five years, with the sole aim of preventing anarchic Somalia from becoming the world's next Afghanistan.

It is a standoff war in which the Pentagon lobs million-dollar cruise missiles into a famine-haunted African wasteland the size of Texas, hoping to kill lone terror suspects who might be dozing in candlelit huts. (The raids' success or failure is almost impossible to verify.)


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/news/article/somalia-a-us-war-nobody-is-watching.html?col=1186032310810&wh=wh