@chemirocha, which Ukraine artillery are you talking about. Are you looking at things with a rear mirror flipping over images?

Sema. We are here to discuss an important national/regional issue that affects us all.

AMERICA’S SHADOW WARS

Big Game: U.S. Soldiers’ Secret Hunt for Jihadists in a Kenyan Forest

Introduction:

“Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is a relatively lean organization and continues to rely on contracted support for administration, logistics, operations, intelligence, and physical security.”

“Think the old BlackWater and Executive Outcomes.”

It’s not uncommon to hear about U.S. Special Forces on the ground in fragile states like Somalia and Iraq, but seeing them in a sovereign democratic state—Kenya—seemed unusual.

U.S. military presence in Kenya had been sparse until the 9/11 attacks. “Boots on the ground” in Kenya was practically unheard of.

In Somalia it also was virtually nonexistent for more than 20 years after the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident in 1993.

But clearly all that has changed.

The United States is waging secret warfare around the world. The operations in and around Kenya’s Boni National Reserve on the Somali border are some of the most mysterious.

The Boni Forest Theater and Land Question

Doza reports that guerrillas took his people’s food and issued warnings not to reveal their whereabouts to Kenya security, “Otherwise, we’ll deal with you.” Aside from this, he notes, the insurgents are polite.

“Al-Shabaab rob from us, but they don’t beat us or grab our land—the way Kenya forces do.”

Land grabs in northeastern Kenya are nothing new. In the ’80s the Kenyan government seized land during a counterinsurgency operations against ethnic Somalis inhabiting the area.

Now locals—ethnic Somalis and Muslim communities generally—suspect that military expansion is an excuse to take more land in and around an area where the Kenya government, the Chinese, and several multinational companies have plans for an oil-related infrastructure mega-development.

The KDF concedes that the forest is a national reserve but insists it is gazetted as government land, not communal land.

How To Undertake A Fishing Expedition:

Swaleh Msellem, a Swahili resident of Lamu Island, manages a petrol station at the Mokowe jetty a few kilometers across a channel on the mainland.

Msellem, now 30, told me how one morning he’d docked his boat at the jetty where at least a dozen non-uniformed men, whom he claims were with the paramilitary wing of Kenya’s National Police Service, had been waiting for him.

Someone pulled a hood over his head and tossed him into a vehicle. Familiar with the area and its roads, he said he could tell he was driven some 40 kilometers away to the Baragoni military base, where he was detained in a shipping container and tortured.

Some of the techniques used on him were repeated mock drownings (a variation on waterboarding) and crushing of testicles.

These were done, he said, to extract a confession that he planned a deadly attack in the nearby village of Hindi, soon after the Mpekatoni massacre. He denied this. The interrogators asked where the weapons were that were used for the attacks. “Which weapons?” he answered.

The KDF continued to grill him, insisting he had information. He told me that during that detention he was driven from Baragoni to an area nearby where he witnessed the execution of two al-Shabaab fighters by a firing squad.

One afternoon he complained of feeling ill. Guards took him outside to a pond where he vomited. Through his loosened blindfold, he was able to glimpse crocodiles on the berm of the pond.

Why were crocodiles being kept inside a military base, he wondered.

Msellem said soldiers later threatened that he’d be fed to the crocodiles like others had been if he didn’t cooperate. After two weeks he was transferred to the port town of Mombasa, to the south, and held several months at the infamous Shimo La Tewa prison in a wing reserved for terrorists.

Msellem eventually was taken into court, where he was acquitted of all murder and terror-related charges for lack of evidence.

Conclusion:

When I interviewed Msellem, he was grimly philosophical. Although he did not see or talk to any U.S. personnel, as far as he knew, he had no doubt they played some role behind the scenes.

“The Americans are very complicated, aren't they? On the one hand they are helping us by building roads, dispensaries, schools, but they also seem to want to kill us.”

In that one observation, Msellem summed up the Jekyll and Hyde nature of the “3-D approach to U.S. Foreign Policy”: defense, diplomacy, and development.

@Mahegoat thanks for sharing, interesting article