CIA Activities in Somalia

According to the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism. As the power balance shifted towards this alliance, the CIA program backfired and the militias of the Islamic Court Union (ICU) gained control of the country. Although the ICU was locally supported for having restored a relative level of peace to the volatile region after having defeated the CIA-funded Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism in the Second Battle of Mogadishu, concerns about the growth and popular support for an Islamic country during the United States' War on Terror led to a new approach of the intervention of CIA, the United States military and Ethiopia's dominantly Christian government.

The use of the Ethiopian Army was seen by the United States as an awkward, but necessary way to prevent Somalia from being ruled by an Islamic government unsympathetic to American interests. In December 2006 State Department officials were issued internal guidelines such as “The press must not be allowed to make this about Ethiopia, or Ethiopia violating the territorial integrity of Somalia...”

The Ethiopian Military force attacked militias of the ICU in a series of battles known as the War in Somalia.

In late 2006, the US State Department said Ethiopia was trying to stem the flow of outside arms shipments to the Islamists in Somalia. Ms. Hironimus added that Washington was concerned about reports that the Islamists were using child soldiers and abusing Ethiopian prisoners of war.

Covert action failed in 2006, in which an effort, run from the CIA station in Nairobi, Kenya, sent money to secular warlords inside Somalia with the aim, among other things, of capturing or killing a handful of suspected members of Al Qaeda believed to be hiding there. Some Africa experts is reducing overall stability by putting a premium on its effort to capture or kill a small number of high-level suspects. Increasing the funding for secular militias, allied as the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism may have triggered counterattacks by Islamic militias, who have been pushing back the secular troops. "This has blown up in our face, frankly," said John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group(ICG), who was a Clinton Administration official in the State Department and National Security Council.

Using local militias was seen as a way to avoid sending US troops. State Department officers, however, disapproved of the CIA effort, with one source saying "They were fully aware that they were doing so without any strategic framework," the official said. "And they realized that there might be negative implications to what they are doing." In 2006, Leslie Rowe, the deputy Chief of Mission in Kenya, signed off on a cable back to State Department headquarters that detailed grave concerns throughout the region about American efforts in Somalia. Around that time, State Department political officer, Michael Zorick, who had been based in Nairobi, was reassigned to Chad after he criticized, inside the government, Washington's policy of paying Somali warlords. The details of the American effort in Somalia are classified.

Somalia's interim president, Abdullahi Yusuf of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), criticized American support for nongovernmental actors in May 2006, "We really oppose American aid that goes outside the government," he said, arguing that the best way to hunt members of Al Qaeda in Somalia was to strengthen the country's government. Prendergast agrees the approach had some success, According his organization, militiamen loyal to warlord Mohammed Deere, a powerful figure in Mogadishu, caught a suspected Qaeda operative, Suleiman Abdalla Salim Hemed, in April 2003 and turned him over to American officials. Prendergast said "I've talked to people inside the Defense Department and State Department who said that this was not a comprehensive policy," he said. "It was being conducted in a vacuum, and they were largely shut out."