Donald Trump's frequent attempts to dress himself in the drag of a peace candidate have always been a cabaret made possible by the Democrats' open-mouthed embrace of humanitarian colonialism. It's real easy to score the role of Charles Lindberg in the school play when the other side insists on dragging the Cheney's to the Sady Hawkin's dance. However, if the Donald has achieved anything but literal homicide during the first months of his second term it has been laying the myth of his non-interventionism to waste once and for all, albeit often with literal homicide.
Trump has somehow made the blatant genocide in Gaza even more blatantly genocidal, largely just by embracing it openly and daring the pussies of the "free world" to do anything about it but scoff and pout. As if playing ringmaster to histories most well-publicized holocaust weren't bad enough, Trump also decided to shatter the faith of his few remaining isolationist supporters by starting another bullshit war in the Middle East based on obvious lies regarding weapons of mass destruction with his far from over "ten-day war" with Iran. He's even gone back on every white dude's least favorite war in Ukraine, shipping Zelensky the hard stuff after making him dance for it in the Oval Office on live television.
The whole damn map is lighting up with fires lit in the name of MAGA and each inferno seems to be spreading rapidly, closer and closer to the Donald's favorite nemesis in China. During a rampage of this size and magnitude it is all too easy for entire atrocities to go completely unnoticed and sadly that usually means someone is getting murdered in Africa while the cameras are turned elsewhere.
Even beyond issues of basic journalistic equity, this is a crying shame because one of the most fascinating conflicts unfolding as we speak is Trump's adopted shadow war in Somalia and the detail that makes this raging tiff truly fascinating is the fact that this is a dirty little war that big bad America appears to be losing and losing badly.
2025 has found Donald Trump overseeing another in a long line of offensives in the embattled east African nation, attempting to root out the militant Islamists of Al-Shabaab along with their tiny ISIS-affiliated offshoot in a cloud acrid black smoke. The US has launched at least 55 airstrikes in the country this year so far, setting the stage for the Donald to decimate his own annual record of 63 set back during his first term in 2019 and the war this time isn't just restricted to a trigger-happy air campaign.
AFRICOM, the US's answer to NATO on the Dark Continent, has launched at least one ground raid in Somalia's northeastern Puntland region in the last month. All while Washington and its various western lackeys' foot the bill for Africans from other nations to die in Somalia as part of the African Union's AUSSUM mission with reports of as many as 20 Ugandans killed in another recent spat with Al-Shabaab.
Billions of dollars are being dumped into this campaign to save Somalia's centralized federal government, and all that cash seems to have done little more than provide kindling for a wildfire rapidly closing in on Mogadishu and Washington's puppet president there, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud.
Just a week before AFRICOM's ground raid, Somalia's American armed and trained military collapsed like a cheap lawn chair in the face of an Al-Shabaab counteroffensive which practically gutted southern and central Somalia of our goons. In a matter of months these rugged Islamic guerrillas have regained 90% of the territory the Somalian Military managed to take during their last offensive in 2022 and 2023, and the reasons that offensive succeeded are the reasons this year's offensive is flailing.
Sheik Mohamud led the previous offensive in name only with AFRICOM having next to nothing to do with its success. The territory taken from Al-Shabaab was largely taken by a coalition of local Somalian militias known as the Macawiisleey and these boys weren't motivated by the lofty ambitions of some nebulous global war on terror. They were members of local clans who were pissed off about the high taxes Al-Shabaab had been racking their cattle herders with and they got revenge by helping the feds take back around 200 villages in a matter of months, but Sheik Mohamud forgot which peasants buttered his side of the toast.
The progress of the 2022-23 offensive collapsed along with Sheik Mohamud's support from the clans who won it. The man had been badly managing this coalition from the start, cutting out respected clan leaders and picking favorites based on protecting his own precarious position in power over any kind of coherent military strategy. The last straw however seemed to come in the form of Sheik Mohamud's push for a "One Man, One Vote" presidential election which would effectively cut out the previous system of allowing clan elders to choose lawmakers in favor of universal suffrage.
On the surface this makes Sheik Mohamud look like a quixotic crusader for liberal democracy struggling to free his nation from the backwards clan system and that is certainly the way his western sponsors are painting this picture but the picture they're painting conveniently neglects to consider the context of the continent's colonial history.
Africa in the 21rst century is chock full of western backed "democracies" which exist only to the degree that the word 'democracy' has become synonymous on the continent with cheap gangsters in western suits with European bank accounts. The reign of Hassan Sheik Mohamud itself has been one defined by rampant corruption, censorship and nepotism, and his "democratic reforms" serve largely just to increase the federal government's power over local governments. He pushed similar "reforms" to the Somalian constitution which have led the regions of Jabaland and Puntland to secede from the federal system altogether, leading to more violent clashes, between the Somalian Army and Jubaland's local forces.
All of this seems to baffle western observers and some of Trump's own officials in the Pentagon have even been toying with the notion of abandoning the notoriously unpopular federal government altogether and falling back to throw their support behind the autonomous region of Puntland as a sort of AFRICOM Alamo on the horn of Africa. Such heresy appears to have been dashed by Trump's Christian-jihadist Svengali, Sebastian Gorka, who prefers any policy with the highest Muslim body count, but even Trump's more "realist" officials miss the fucking point here.
Somalians are not rejecting the presidency or even democracy itself, they are rejecting the Westphalian Nation State; a distinctly European form of government defined by strict borders and a total monopoly on the use of force held by a centralized government and their standing army. No African has ever consented to this colonialist construct and that construct doesn't become a democracy just because you allow a captive population to choose from a carefully curated selection of western puppets. This essentially just amounts to picking which dictator gets to sell your daughter into prostitution to the World Bank.
Somalians are backing the clans, as they always have, because they represent a far more African and a far more democratic form of governance than anything recognized by the UN. Somalia's ancient clan system is largely governed by the Xeer legal system, a highly decentralized and regionally autonomous network of courts overseen by community elders based largely on oral traditions that predate both Islamic and civil law. It is a largely voluntary network of conflict resolution in which communities choose their own judges to settle disputes through reconciliation, negotiation and compromise over police state posturing and carceral justice.
Somalia has been invaded and occupied by a wide variety of assholes- the Portuguese, the Ottomans, the British, fascists, communists and capitalists- but time and time again, the people of Somalia have always returned to the Xeer system because the Xeer system is a system of distinctly African democracy, and this is what terrifies the west, because African democracy is basically just indigenous anarchism, which has a sticky tendency of being hard to regulate from another continent.
With this in mind, it's little wonder that the closest thing Somalia has seen to peace in centuries was during the Islamic Courts Union that governed large portions of the nation between western interventions from the mid-nineties to the mid-2000s, because this system succeeded largely due to the fact that the Union left governance up to the clans and the Xeer legal system.
The CIA attempted and failed to squash the Union with a literal Warlord Coalition in 2006, but this only empowered the Courts to take Mogadishu, so the US used their puppets in Ethiopia to invade the nation later that year with these forces then occupying Somalia until they left in 2009 before being invited back by our good friend Hassan Sheik Mohamud whenever he began to lose control of the grift, but he never really had control to begin with.
Al-Shabaab formed from a breakaway faction of the Islamic Court's military wing and served as the primary form of popular resistance during the Ethiopian occupation. Their adoption of jihadism is largely a cosmetic ploy to curry favor with the wealthy Middle Eastern donor class. Their relative popularity however is based largely on their radical cache as a remnant of the still popular Islamic Courts.
This cache has allowed them to control more of the Somalian economy than the federal government and has also afforded them the ability to do as Hezbollah and the Taliban once did and form a sort of counter-state, providing far more popular services than the central government. The problem is that Al-Shabaab has gotten too big for their own good and have begun to behave just like any other state, robbing penniless farmers in the name of taxation and massacring any village who puts up half a fight.
The Macawiisleey offensive proved that the clans still governed by Xeer are more than capable of taking out the trash themselves, but Donald Trump isn't interested in fighting terrorism. He is interested in fighting China who has recently supplanted the US and the EU as Africa's main trading and investment partner. Somalia is of particular importance because of its strategic position on the Red Sea. With Yemen already lost to the dueling counter-state of the Houthis, Pax Americana is going to need another set of gallows from which to strangle Eurasian trade running through the Suez Canal.
The good news here is that this is a war that Donald Trump is already losing. The bad news is that Donald Trump has been losing for a living for his entire life because he is part of the ruling class in a liberal democracy that seems to be dedicated to awarding losers until it goes broke. Somalia will survive the way they always have, by the skin of their teeth with their clans and their culture and a form of governance built on cooperation rather than occupation. In the long run, it's actually the Americans who are fucked as we circle the drain with one morally and financially bankrupt bullshit war after another.
But hey, maybe the Macawiisleey will loan us a cow after Rome stops burning.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* List of Demands by Saul Williams
* Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival
* People of the Sun by Rage Against the Machine
* I'm a African by Dead Prez
* Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush
* When the Revolution Comes by the Last Poets
* I Against I by Bad Brains
* Chase the Devil by Max Romeo
* Salvation by Rancid
* Pressure Drop by the Maytals
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