This morning we had more news about the Minneapolis Missing Somali youths and how they had likely gone off to join Al-Shabaab in Somalia. Now here is a story about Human Rights Watch blaming the problems in Somalia on the United States (so what else is new?). Hat tip: Jerry Gordon.
The State Department protests charges that the US has made Somalia a battlefield in the war on terror by supporting the transitional government. Heck, I can’t figure out what is going on there, but this is what interested me because I think it’s inaccurate.
The United States fears that Somalia could be a terrorist breeding ground, and accuses a powerful insurgent faction known as al-Shabab of harboring the al-Qaida-linked terrorists who allegedly blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
It seems to me that a more accurate statement is that we and other do-gooder western countries have been the “breeding ground” and Somalia is where we send all these strapping young men we raised to fight.
So, we might be making the situation in Somalia worse, as Human Rights Watch contends, but not in the way they think.
Since I haven’t mentioned it lately and we have new readers, we have resettled over 80,000 Somali refugees in the last 25 years and half of those have come since 9/11.