Does the United States owe reparations to Somalia?

Abstract

For over twenty years the United States government has engaged in what it calls a global ‘war on terror’ (GWOT). This war spans continents and while US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq receive modest attention, the secretive US war in Somalia remains under-discussed. This article offers an empirical and theoretical examination of what the US has done in Somalia since 2001, considering the political, economic and ideological elements of these acts. Data on the US’s war on the Somali people is placed in dialogue with ongoing theorising on the merits of reparations in the world system.

Introduction

In 2001, then President of the US George W. Bush launched a global ‘war on terror’. ¹ The subsequent two decades of this global ‘war on terror’ (GWOT) spanned continents, cost the US over $5 trillion, led to the death of at least several hundred thousand people and displaced tens of millions. It permanently upended the social, political and economic fabric of life across North and East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, South and Southwest Asia, and beyond. ² Within the US, hate crimes directed at Muslim Americans increased and Islamophobia became widespread. ³ This article focuses on the GWOT’s multifaceted and deleterious impact on Somalia and its diaspora, and whether the US government owes reparations to Somalis as a result of these actions.

The US has waged a decades-long political, financial and ideological war on the people of Somalia, often with little-to-no substantive media discussion or public input on the merits of its activities. This includes CIA-funded proxy wars, the freezing of key systems of financial remittances, drone strikes and support for interventions via other militaries in the Horn of Africa. The US’s strong presence in the region suggests that they may be planning for a long-term strategy of militarised accumulation, whereby the US and allied security services use force to generate favourable conditions for resource extraction and capital accumulation. ⁴

The legacy of European colonialism, US neo-colonialism and the broader western capitalist hyper-exploitation and underdevelopment of Africa is well documented. ⁵ But any attempt to ameliorate past-to-present wrongs carried out by core capitalist regions must grapple with issues of symbolic and material redress. There is a long history of positing reparations as a salve for the horrors of colonialism, including the Italian colonial period in Somalia. ⁶ In the context of twenty-first century militarised accumulation and domination in the world system, a consideration of reparations with regards to the US’s actions in Somalia is necessary.

While many discussions on reparations within the US context address the possible obligation of the government to provide reparations to the descendants of African slaves or Black Americans more broadly, the debate on the merits of reparations is much larger in scope. We have seen recent demands for the US to offer reparations to Latinx immigrants living within the US as a consequence of long-term US imperial interventionism across Latin America, while other work places the debate on reparations for slavery and colonialism in a world-systemic scale of analysis. ⁷ This article draws inspiration from this expanding discussion of reparations, and will address what past wrongs were done, why they were/are significant then/now, and how a forward-looking and expansive concept of reparations can inform current debates on reparations. Given the US’s current approach of militarised accumulation and violent repression, the consideration of reparations would be one piece of the larger puzzle of reorienting the modern GWOT to one of transformative justice and restitution, the promotion of human rights and dignities and acknowledgement of a debt that may be owed for decades of wrongdoing.

This article will first compare and contrast differing interpretations of reparations and how they relate to the argument of the US providing reparations to Somalia. Then, it briefly outlines the history of Somalia, US interventionism in Somalia and the political conditions of the region in the pre-9/11 period. After that, I document the substantial degree of material and ideological interventionism the US has directed towards Somalia since 2001, and its direct relationship to the question of reparations. Finally, I conclude with an argument outlining the ways in which a broadly-conceived project of reparations, flowing from the US to Somalia and the Somali diaspora, might create the conditions for human flourishing in the years ahead.

This article highlights the deleterious effects of the GWOT on Somalia, and places these acts in a larger transdisciplinary discussion on world-systemic inequality, underdevelopment, state-sanctioned violence and reparations.

Perspectives on reparations, past and present

Reparations are conceived of in various material and symbolic ways, with the intent to address a wide variety of circumstances. ⁸ The history behind the idea of providing reparations to groups systematically targeted for collective punishment, slavery, hyper-exploitation and oppression over the centuries is extensive. Accordingly, the specifics of past proposals and implementations of reparations will be addressed, however, this article does not intend to provide a literature review of all past movements for reparations. Instead, I highlight some past movements and research on reparations and pay special attention to how they might inform the issue at hand, which in this article is the role of the US government in their treatment of Somalia since the onset of the GWOT in 2001. Specifically, it examines the impact of the GWOT on the material wellbeing of people in Somalia and those who may have relocated to the US over the past two decades. It asks how we can harness reparations to promote human flourishing and safety for Somalis impacted by the US’s actions. As the global hegemon of the capitalist world-system, the US’s actions will be contextualised within a global framework – it’s crucial, since we are addressing a transnational issue that impacts people far beyond US borders. Material and symbolic aspects of reparations will be taken seriously, as they both have merit for addressing specific needs and claims.

The case for reparations inside the US has a long history, given the fact that the country was built via Indigenous dispossession and genocide, mass enslavement of African peoples, and in general, racialised hyper-exploitation and violence – domestically and abroad. ⁹ Given the ample documentation of the US government’s racialised exploitation of Black Americans, and the ongoing position of Black Americans within the increasingly precarious working class, it is no surprise that there remains a robust call for reparations. ¹⁰

In recent years, the discussion on reparations within the US was reignited with the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 essay on the issue, and subsequent debates on the merits and/or limitations of demanding reparations. ¹¹ Other work details the long-term harm done to multiple generations of Black Americans via the system of mass incarceration, and the need to reckon with this issue via reparations and a transitional justice framework. ¹² As of early 2022, The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) outlined the need for comprehensive reparations for Black Americans, stating that the ‘past and continuing harms . . . from colonialism to slavery through food and housing redlining, mass incarceration, and surveillance’ justified such a demand. ¹³ These discussions all touch upon issues of redistribution of wealth and the symbolic significance of acknowledging past wrongdoing, which can be extended to thinking through ways the US government might make amends for their imperial excursions in Somalia.

There is also a history of demands for the US to offer reparations to Vietnam, after its decades-long war on Vietnam which not only led to the torture, displacement and deaths of millions of people, but permanently destroyed the environment and ecology of large parts of the country and likely caused multigenerational harm to survivors of the US’s deployment of chemical weapons. ¹⁴ After the US government forced over 110,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps during the second world war, a robust social movement formed to demand compensation and redress. ¹⁵ Within these calls for reparations are both material and symbolic acts of acknowledging previous wrongdoing by the US government and staging a long-term campaign of demanding what you believe to be owed to aggrieved groups through various political and legal mechanisms.

The material and ideological support the US government has historically provided to pro-capitalist dictators, paramilitary groups and death-squads across Latin America is well documented. As such, there is a clearly established relationship between what the US government does abroad and its impact on immigration to the US from Latin America. ¹⁶ Sociologist and legal scholar Laura E. Gómez traces the links between the US’s interventionism and racist violence inflicted across Latin America over the course of several decades. She follows with a comprehensive call for reparations, including full citizenship and legal rights to those currently residing in the US as ‘undocumented’ and opening the US southern border to immigrants which would ‘[make] sense as reparations for direct and indirect American imperialism in the region’. ¹⁷

Pinpointing the world-systemic connections between wrongdoing the US commits abroad and its link to what happens domestically is a crucial element of the forthcoming argument. It helps promote a ‘politics of accountability’ within the US, while acknowledging the crucial role the US has played as a hegemonic actor in the capitalist world system. ¹⁸ Therefore, the role of the US military and private capital/corporate interests in Africa, specifically during the GWOT, and especially within the Horn of Africa, will be pertinent to the analysis. Ideologies and policies promoting specific political and economic agendas in Somalia, the Horn of Africa and the broader Global South remain key to understanding world-systemic power asymmetries, providing a foundation for making sense of calls for reparations.

A major contribution to ongoing debates on the material, symbolic and world-building potential of reparations is Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Reconsidering Reparations. ¹⁹ Táíwò critically engages with the promises and pitfalls of differing approaches to reparations and highlights the importance of a world-scale framework to understand power and responsibility. Simply put, ‘global racial empire is the what, [and] capitalism is the how’. ²⁰

One key element of demanding reparations is to account for past-to-present material destitution of the aggrieved parties. This is fundamental and can provide much-needed capital and resources to help people immediately live better lives. Although this ‘harm reduction’ approach would take a step towards ‘closing the gap’ between the wealthy exploiters/harm-doers in relation to those harmed, it does not fundamentally challenge the world-systemic terrain that set up these asymmetrical power conditions in the first place. ²¹ Simply put, it looks to close disparities within the rules of global capitalism, without reorienting the system towards something more socially just.

Besides material restitution, a symbolic element of reparations has strong merit. This ‘relationship repair’ approach highlights a moral injustice/wrongdoing and demands the aggressors acknowledge their crimes while reckoning with the symbolic, cultural and psychological harm that evolved from their wrongdoing. ²² Although this approach towards addressing moral failings has value, it also may skirt the material deprivation – highlighted in the aforementioned ‘harm reduction’ approach – that stems from historical wrongdoing.

The strengths of the material and symbolic/moral approaches are evident not only from a philosophical standpoint, but in concrete form as well. Reports on Somali citizens directly impacted by the US GWOT operations in the area illustrate that ‘the relatives of civilian casualties talk about compensation, but they talk about recognition as well’. ²³ Here, we clearly see the need for material and symbolic redress.

The focus on material and symbolic reparations should be also supplemented by a larger view of world building. This approach acknowledges the material and symbolic legacies of a past injustice, but avoids keeping the scope of analysis too narrow. It looks to map forward a path towards social justice that clearly ‘evaluate[s] social structures and arrangements’ on a world scale; where historically cumulative advantages and disadvantages accrue to different political parties in the world system, and where a project of reparations would be about expanding the autonomy, dignity and possibilities of the communities harmed. In other words, this ‘constructive view’ of reparations seeks to rebalance the power dynamics of the modern world system, helping to tilt it in favour of the oppressed. ²⁴

Keeping our view of reparations embedded in a historical understanding of the colonial, racialised and capitalist dynamics of the prior five centuries expands the scope of analysis for how we make sense of what short-, medium- and long-term wrongs can be observed, and what it would take to address them. It allows us to make important links from Africa to the larger Africana diaspora, understand their interlocking struggles and locate broader patterns of inequalities across the world system. It will help locate drivers of legislative (in)actions or policy changes, the socio-political forces needed to bring about reparations and how to forge links of solidarity among various oppressed groups worldwide. ²⁵

The US’s rationale for over two decades of overt and covert interventionist policies in Somalia has been justified after 9/11 as the need to prevent the spread of terrorism. But based on a review of evidence and documentation as detailed below, the likelihood of the spread of terrorism was not valid. The outcome of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq during their GWOT campaign was disastrous and led to calls for acknowledging this harm and offering reparations to the people of Iraq. ²⁶ The US GWOT ‘assert[s] the presumptions and practices of empire and herald[s] the prospect of the forcible re-mapping of the planet’, making the consideration of US reparations for regions directly impacted by these policies more relevant than ever. ²⁷

With all of this said, reparations, ‘[c]onceptually as well as in practice . . . should be understood to be one part of a much larger agenda’, ²⁸ necessitating a re-evaluation of the entire purpose of the US’s GWOT, its broader foreign policy goals and the balance of power and democracy across the world system. There is much to analyse, and much to be done.

Documenting the evidence, building the case

Despite spending more than two decades waging war on Somalia in the name of allegedly ‘fighting terrorism’, the US government has routinely denied that it is waging a war. During a March 2008 US Senate hearing for the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, Theresa Whelan, was asked by Wisconsin Senator Russel Feingold, ‘Are we at war in Somalia? And, if so, who is the enemy?’ Whelan responded bluntly, ‘The United States is not at war in Somalia. And I think that our enemy in that region, Senator, are the al-Qaeda operatives’. ²⁹ Ten years later, in March 2018, the commander of US Africa Command (AFRICOM), General Thomas David Waldhauser, discussed the US role in Somalia in the following way: ‘I wouldn’t characterise that we’re at war. It’s specifically designed for us not to own that.’ ³⁰

If the US was not formally at war in Somalia, how and why are Somali citizens being designated as enemies and combatants in the GWOT, why might Somalis be resisting US interventions, and what were the US’s motives for intervention in Somalia if they were not directly at war with/in Somalia? And why might the US government be so interested in downplaying their significant post-2001 role in Somalia? To answer these questions, we must first briefly outline the US government’s policy in the region in the decade preceding September 11 and the onset of the GWOT. Before we can do that, a brief note on twenty years of US-Somalia relations is needed.

The opacity of US activity in Somalia in the late-twentieth century

After Somalia gained independence from British and Italian colonialism in 1960, it had a democratic civilian government. Lasting less than a decade, this ended in October 1969 when the President was assassinated and a military coup put Siad Barre in power. This all took place in a Cold War context, where emerging post-colonial states often sought alliances with, or became pawns of, global powers vying for hegemony. Support for Somalia’s socialist government was precarious, with early backing from the Soviet Union evaporating by the late 1970s, and the US stepping in to offer material support through the late 1980s. ³¹ By 1990, an anti-Barre insurgency was spreading, and he was forced to flee in 1991. The entirety of the Somali state apparatus crumbled shortly thereafter, and with various factions vying for control of the capital, the infrastructure and levels of human security rapidly diminished.

Most westerners became aware of the US presence in Somalia because of the 2001 Hollywood blockbuster film Black Hawk Down. ³² The US intervention may have contained a partial ‘humanitarian’ component, to prevent famine-induced starvation, but was likely linked to the desire to set up a stable political regime to support oil and natural gas exploration in the region. As a report from January 1993 noted, ‘nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia’s pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown’, and these companies seemed keen on a US intervention to ‘help protect their multimillion-dollar investments’. ³³ The interest of oil and gas exploration in the region remained strong in the subsequent two decades and cannot be underestimated as a factor in the US’s larger GWOT strategy.

Ultimately, this US-led intervention is likely to have killed over one thousand Somalis and produced national humiliation for the US military when the corpses of dead soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993. ³⁴ The failure to restore order and set up a stable political regime, coupled with the public display of humiliation towards US soldiers, engendered the new political discursive term, ‘Somali Syndrome’. This term was pointed towards US politicians who were bitter and scared from the prior failure and now sought to withdraw their forces (and interests) from the region and elsewhere, rebuffing any future interventionism in the world system. ³⁵ However, this ‘syndrome’ did not prevent the US government from taking a keen interest in Somalia in the late 1990s.

The US wages economic warfare on Somalia

In the immediate wake of 9/11, the US government sought to shut down US and foreign offices of a large Somali money-remittance organisation, known as Al-Barakaat. The justification was to prevent Al-Barakaat from allegedly financing terrorism. ³⁶ In the five years prior to closing down Al-Barakaat’s financial operations, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) spent a significant amount of time exploring whether Al-Barakaat was being used by Al-Itihaad Al-Islamiya (AIAI), a Somali-based regional political Islamist organisation, to fund terrorist groups and/or attacks. Many early investigations came to dead ends, with leads turning out to be ‘lack[ing] credibility’, ‘dated’ in their appraisal of the situation and found ‘no evidence that any of the Somalis who used Al-Barakaat to remit funds did so with the intention of supporting terrorism’. ³⁷ Despite this, the US government’s interest in Al-Barakaat lingered, as some Federal agents believed ‘it seemed improbable that the relatively low-skilled Somali community in Minneapolis, although large, could have amassed so much money through legitimate wages’. ³⁸

After 9/11, the Bush administration declared that financial warfare would be a crucial complement to the military ambitions of the GWOT. One of its first targets was Al-Barakaat, which was claimed to be financing terrorist operations. ³⁹ With bravado, Bush proclaimed: ‘by shutting these networks down, we disrupt the murderers’ work’. ⁴⁰

Historically, Al-Barakaat was not only ‘a safe, quick, and effective way [for people] to move money earned in the United States back to their families and homes’ in Somalia, but also vital for infrastructural endeavours like water purification and telecommunications. ⁴¹ Despite the multi-year campaign to paint Al-Barakaat as a global terrorism financing outlet, the seizing of tens of millions of its assets, and the closing of its operations across multiple countries, the outcome of the US’s own investigation was clear. It found ‘no direct evidence’ that Al-Barakaat funded terrorism, it ‘could not find evidence of terrorist financing’, and suggestions that Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda had connections to Al-Barakaat and terrorist financing ‘[could] not be corroborated by documentary or other circumstantial evidence that supports the allegation’. ⁴²

The potential for closing down key remittance systems to inflict serious material harm, to a country that was already one decade into a civil war, was significant. A 2001 United Nations Development Programme report on Somalia identified ‘immediate repercussions for the Somali people’ resulting from the US’s initiative to disable the remittance system. ⁴³ It continues by declaring that ‘Somalia’s fragile economy . . . [was] further weakened by the closure of money transfer agencies through which the all-important remittances are channelled’. ⁴⁴ In 2002, one analyst estimated that ‘approximately 40 percent of all Somali urban households’ rely on remittances from the diaspora. ⁴⁵ Another analyst put it even more bluntly: ‘If we talk about the collateral damage of this decision, this is equivalent to killing civilians. . .It could spell disaster for Somalia.’ ⁴⁶ The economic warfare waged by the US government was a punishment to Somalia as a whole and did nothing to prevent the funding of al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

The US wages physical and ideological warfare on Somalia

In December 2006 the Ethiopian military invaded Somalia, beginning what would be a two-year occupation and total war on the population of Somalia. This invasion was supported by the US government in sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit, ways.

In the years of the US’s GWOT leading up to the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, the US government worked tirelessly to cultivate a close relationship with the Ethiopian intelligence apparatus, while expanding its presence in the Horn of Africa. This entailed the cultivation of formal intelligence-sharing operations with Ethiopia, setting up a military cooperation base in Djibouti and the direct funnelling of hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of dollars to local ‘warlords’ in Somalia, under the auspices of ‘countering terrorism’. ⁴⁷

The US and Ethiopia had similar reservations over one significant development that emerged in Somalia by 2005–2006. A few dozen local courts in Somalia had coalesced into what would be known as the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which began filling the void left by a feeble state apparatus that was seen as thoroughly illegitimate and doing the bidding of Ethiopia and the West. The UIC was lifting roadblocks and checkpoints hitherto run by unpopular warlords, cleaning the streets, reopening schools and clinics, getting airports and seaports running again and more. ⁴⁸ Several analysts familiar with the situation noted that the UCI had ‘widespread public support’ and ‘the people of Mogadishu mostly welcomed the takeover’ in the capital. ⁴⁹

Despite the widespread support for this loose coalition of Islamic courts, the US was unwilling to accept it. During the first half of 2006, the CIA began funnelling hundreds of thousands of dollars to a coalition of warlords dubbed the ‘Alliance for Restoration of Peace and Counter Terrorism’ (ARPCT). This act was seen as ‘unexpected and unnecessary . . . produc[ing] political outcomes that pushed Somalia into an entirely new and generally unwelcome political trajectory’. ⁵⁰ When the CIA-backed ARPCT was routed immediately, the US State Department was also considering the need to ‘nullify’ the UIC, while claiming to be engaged in peaceful diplomacy. ⁵¹

The inability to quash the UIC not only upset the US’s aspirations to stamp out political Islamists in the era of the GWOT, but upset the Ethiopian government. The Ethiopian government was seen as a long-time interloper in the peacebuilding and state-building process over the prior ten years and was viewed as having an interest in keeping the Somali state either weak or subservient to the demands of Ethiopia. ⁵²

With the inability to furtively dispose of the UIC, the interests of the US and Ethiopian governments converged on a desire to see it gone. By late 2006, the US officials had ominously shifted tone on Somalia, declaring there to be a clear and present danger of al-Qaeda in Somalia that must be crushed. With the US military’s advice and support, Ethiopian tanks rolled across their border into Somalia in December 2006, hoping to crush the UIC once and for all. ⁵³ The subsequent two-year occupation and assault on Somalia was devastating to civilians, and seen as a collective punishment that included widespread and indiscriminate shooting, bombing of civilian areas, arbitrary detentions, killings and rape. This occasionally happened in joint operations with Somali forces and has been identified as ‘violations of the laws of war, including acts by individuals that amount to war crimes’. ⁵⁴

After two years of Ethiopian occupation, both tacitly and explicitly supported in various ways, US officials have refused to meaningfully confront or even publicly acknowledge the extent of Ethiopian military and Transitional Federal Government (TFG) abuses in the country. This period of collective punishment ‘tethered the US directly to the Ethiopian offensive in the eyes of Somalis’. ⁵⁵ Of equal importance is the fact that the deliberate quashing of the UIC turned what had previously been ‘little more than a bit player’ – or at best, a power-hungry, but still marginal, force – into a battle-hardened insurgency that would gain thousands of militant supporters. This group goes by the name of Al-Shabaab. ⁵⁶

To summarise, the intentional targeting and removal of the UIC from power in Mogadishu was a path-shaping decision that led the US, Ethiopia, and eventually Kenya, the African Union and other military forces to become embroiled in an intractable war that might have been entirely avoidable. The impact of these actions are clearly within the scope of an agenda for reparations which addresses both material and symbolic needs. One scholar who interviewed numerous Somalis found that ‘most Somalis, Islamists, intellectuals, and business groups interviewed think that the United States is punishing the Somali people for the 1993 events’, when eighteen US special forces were killed during the Battle of Mogadishu (‘Black Hawk Down’) intervention. ⁵⁷ Other Somalis reported that they felt Ethiopian forces were ‘slaughtering [Somalis] like goats’ during their US-backed intervention. ⁵⁸ The physical and emotional toll of this violence on Somali society was collective and must be addressed.

Recall the March 2008 Senate hearing mentioned earlier, where the US Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs was asked ‘are we at war in Somalia?’, to which she replied, ‘the United States is not at war in Somalia’. ⁵⁹ This contradicted not only the evidence presented above, but also US activities little more than a month later. In the early hours of 1 May 2008, a US airstrike killed Al-Shabaab military commander Aden Ayro and several others. This attempted act of ‘leadership decapitation’ ⁶⁰ did not prevent Al-Shabaab from its continued insurgency and led to a significant degree of resentment, as Al-Shabaab gained more recruits and took over more territory in the year ahead. ⁶¹ Ayro was the first military leader emerging from the UIC. His close ally Ahmed Godane, who would rule Al-Shabaab for many years to come, pushed the organisation in a mercilessly brutal direction and immediately demanded retaliatory revenge on the US and Ethiopia for the killing of Ayro. ⁶²

As one study on the impact of attempted leadership decapitation on Al-Shabaab concluded, ‘there is evidence that leadership decapitation significantly increased the potency of Al-Shabaab’ after Ahmed Godane was also assassinated via the US drone strike in September 2014. ⁶³ In October 2022, the US carried out yet another airstrike in Somalia, killing senior Al-Shabaab leader and co-founder of the group, Abdullahi Yare. ⁶⁴ Not only did this killing fail to facilitate the decline of Al-Shabaab, but instead the group redoubled the fervour of attacks, carrying out some of the most intensive and deadliest of the previous decade. ⁶⁵

Approximately one decade after the US/CIA was actively funding warlords as proxy fighters in their GWOT, we learned that the CIA was financing a secret prison in Mogadishu, formally run by the Somali National Security Agency (NSA), but fully reliant on the US. US intelligence agents, ‘according to [one] Somali official, operate unilaterally in the country, while the French agents are embedded within the African Union force known as AMISOM’. ⁶⁶ In addition to covert warfare and funding to various other entities, keeping minimal US ‘boots on the ground’, the neoliberalisation of war continued in Somalia. ‘Private security’ groups, such as the Washington DC-based Bancroft emerged, sending paid ‘mentors’ hired from South Africa, Scandinavia and France to Somalia. ⁶⁷

The protracted Somalia civil war between the 2006 invasion and the present cannot be fully documented here, but clearly shows that the US, Ethiopian and other allied forces’ approach towards the situation has not stemmed the spread of political violence and mass immiseration – and often was responsible for its emergence. Since the first recorded US airstrike in Somalia in 2007, there has been collective impunity for US officials, while Somalis suffer. According to one report, from the very first US airstrike on Somalia until July 2021, the US has only claimed responsibility for five wrongful deaths and eight injuries. Among the four families impacted by these assaults, three reported that ‘none of them have personally heard from the U.S. government or received a condolence payment’. ⁶⁸ As one 2020 report put it, ‘civilian casualties continue to mount from the US military’s secret air war in Somalia, with no justice or reparation for the victims of possible violations of international humanitarian law’. ⁶⁹

The US’s increased reliance on drone strikes in Somalia and the broader terrain of the GWOT are significant. Drone warfare has material and psychological impacts, as it not only kills ‘militants’ and/or civilians, but leaves grieving families, destitution, psychological torment, stigma and lingering fears for the living. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that the US conducted at least 202 drone strikes in Somalia between January 2004 and February 2020, killing between 1,197–1,410 people, with between twelve to ninety-seven civilian deaths, among whom one to thirteen were children. ⁷⁰ The impact of drone strikes is clearly outlined in the following statement:

covert drone strikes take a particular toll, striking unannounced and without any public understanding of who is – and importantly, who is not – a target. For victims in particular, there is no one to recognise, apologise for, or explain their sorrow; for communities living under the constant watch of surveillance drones, there is no one to hold accountable for their fear. ⁷¹

The implications of this for the case of the US owing of reparations to Somalia is clear. The twenty-year ‘shadow war’ the US has waged on Somalia has been disastrous to the people of Somalia. Somalia’s federal government has routinely been seen as feeble, and only survived through periodic doses of ideological and material support of the US and Ethiopian governments, among other key actors.

The fallout: mass displacement and Islamophobia

The GWOT has also created widespread Islamophobia within the US and human displacement in the Horn of Africa and beyond. In January 2017, US President Trump signed an Executive Order that colloquially became known as the ‘Muslim Ban’, which placed a ninety-day travel ban on foreign national from seven Muslim-majority countries. ⁷² At a 2019 Trump rally, a crowd erupted in chants of ‘Send her back!’ ⁷³ directed towards US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Somali American representing Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District. At another rally, Trump described Representative Omar as a ‘hate-filled, American-bashing socialist’ trying to turn the US into the mirror-image of Somalia. ⁷⁴ With that said, anti-Muslim sentiments in the US predate the Trump era. Muslim Americans faced ‘a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment’ after September 2001, where an ultra-nationalist ‘American pride’ sentiment was coupled with racism and Islamophobia across the US. ⁷⁵ On 15 October 2002, a sixty-six-year-old Somali Muslim man in Minneapolis, MN, was punched in the head while standing at a bus stop. He died nine days later. According to one report, ‘his son and Somali community members attributed the attack against [him] to anger created against Somalis by a front-page local newspaper article that appeared two days’ earlier, which said that ‘Somalis in Minneapolis had given money to a Somali terrorist group with links to Osama Bin Laden’. ⁷⁶ In June 2016, a white American man intentionally shot and wounded two Somali Americans on their way to Ramadan prayers in Minneapolis. He was said to have shouted anti-Muslim slurs as he opened fire at people sitting in their car. ⁷⁷

Beyond the Islamophobia within the US that Somali and other Muslim Americans face, the mass forced movement of Somalis has skyrocketed. By September 2020, the US GWOT directly or indirectly led to the displacement of at least 37 million people, from eight key countries in which the US is involved. For Somalia, it is estimated that at least 4.2 million have become internally displaced persons (IDP) or refugees. ⁷⁸ Most of the refugees who flee Somalia go to Kenya, Ethiopia or Yemen, and according to one comprehensive study, ‘thousands reached the United States during each year of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, while less than 700 have arrived in the last three years of the Trump administration’. ⁷⁹

A clear pattern emerged as a result of the US GWOT, especially as it pertains to the Somali diaspora. Not only were Somalis within Somalia suffering, but those who sought shelter in the US were likely to face scrutiny and distrust among many Americans who saw them as outsiders or a potential threat, causing material and emotional harm.

The US’s obligation to provide reparations to Somalia

Any comprehensive conceptualisation of what Somalia is owed via reparations must include different symbolic and material issues and should not be conceived as one singular act. ⁸⁰ Rather than aspiring for small concessions, the vision should be world building and provide people with the tools necessary to make short-, medium- and long-term positive improvements in their lives. Having documented how the US government’s actions physically, emotionally, economically, politically and ideologically harmed the people of Somalia, we can restate its significance in ways that directly pinpoint its place within the domains of symbolic and material harms.

The US government was viewed to be collectively punishing the people of Somalia, while supporting extraordinarily unpopular warlords and a nearly non-functional and corrupt TFG. The active role the US played in undermining and dismantling the UIC – which enjoyed widespread popularity and provided much-needed social services – was not only an assault on the material wellbeing of Somalis, but also an ideological and symbolic assault. It portrayed Islamic governance structures as illegitimate and incompatible with state-building in Somalia, flying in the face of all those who supported them. The US-supported Ethiopian military invasion and occupation further marginalised the US’s possible role as a neutral and/or peaceful arbiter in the region, causing Somalis to view the US and Ethiopia as working together to bring humiliation, mass-suffering and immiseration to their country.

The existing US approach to Somalia, which views it as a ‘hotbed for terrorism’ and in need of counter-terrorism measures, has produced no tangibly positive outcome for Somalia. If the goal of the GWOT is to reduce terrorism, it has done precisely the opposite. ⁸¹ Al-Shabaab emerged as a several thousand-strong organisation with widespread support after the US and Ethiopia sought to quash the popular UIC. Furthermore, the idea that ‘leadership decapitation’ would prevent the rise and functionality of the group has proven to be wrong and serves as a continued recruitment tool by leaders of the insurgency. The US Department of State observed in its 2019 annual report on global terrorism that Al-Shabaab still had between 7,000–9,000 members, carried out over 1,000 attacks during the year, and that ‘with the notable exception of targeted operations carried out by U.S.-trained and -equipped units of Somali military forces, the Somali National Army as a whole remained incapable of independently securing and retaking towns from al-Shabaab’. ⁸²

When the US formally ended its twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan by withdrawing its remaining troops in 2021, many observers noted that the US had a moral responsibility to accept refugees from the region who needed to flee violence – in no small part related to US actions in the region over the prior two decades. ⁸³ This logic could be extended to the case of Somali refugees, should they desire to relocate to the US. Any existing undocumented Somalis in the US should be granted citizenship, and all those who seek to move to the US should be accepted. To help refugees thrive, more than simply accepting their arrival, a remapping of US social service programmes and political imaginations is required. In short, it requires nothing short of breaking the political and ideological coordinates of capitalist realism and clearing away the fog of ‘lost futures’ in the US, in which we are all precarious and expendable in the grinding gears of global capitalism. ⁸⁴ Newly arriving Somali refugees should not just be able to flee instability in Somalia, but should be welcomed into a country that promotes political, cultural and economic flourishing. This would be a form of world building through reparations. ⁸⁵

The twenty-year strategy of counter-terrorism and propping-up of the feeble Somali government in a total war on Al-Shabaab has been financially costly in terms of body count and it resulted in few benefits. ⁸⁶ The US’s war on Somalia is not only costly across the board of metrics, but citizens in the US have little means to call upon their government to cease operations, given that ‘US military involvement in Somalia since 9/11 . . . turned toward secretive operations, private security contractors, foreign mercenaries, military proxies and drone strikes’. ⁸⁷ Therefore, the US government’s continued denial of being at war with Somalia is not only an obvious falsehood, but impedes public awareness of the extent to which the US has been involved in the region for two decades.

Just as the US government has a long history of lying about, or offering rose-tinted appraisals of, US ‘progress’ in its wars, the media has a long history of wilfully ignoring less savoury aspects of war, or repeating the government’s falsehoods. ⁸⁸ The US media’s consistent failure to provide substantive and truthful content on the historical reasons why the Somali state is unstable, and why Al-Shabaab emerged, has left the US public ignorant. The US’s war on the people of Somalia is an ongoing issue and cannot be dismissed as historically irrelevant or unrelated to current events in the region. To take seriously the claims stated above requires nothing less than a total reorientation of the current trajectory of US media practices, which often prioritise click-bait, provocative editorials and thirty-second clips of decontextualised ‘news’.

The US’s GWOT has created widespread Islamophobia in the US, and while such attitudes predate 2001, they were significantly amplified by politicians in the post-2001 period. ⁸⁹ In terms of symbolic reparations, the US government must accept moral responsibility for the fervour of anti-Islamic/Muslim and anti-Somali sentiment that has been generated over the past twenty years. It is estimated that at least 150,000 ⁹⁰ Somalis live in the US – and a far greater number of Muslim Americans – and the value of their faith and lives must be affirmed.

The direct material/physical harm caused by Islamophobia and anti-Somali attitudes in the US are tangible, and these hate crimes deserve to be discussed in a much larger context. The dialectal link between what the US does abroad, and how it relates to its domestic population, requires acknowledging that the US has in fact been at war in Somalia, is in part responsible for its destabilisation and also has a responsibility to protect those currently living within the US – who often fear falling victim to hate crime. The domestic/global context are two sides of the same coin, as they manifest ‘domestically in the form of stereotyping, prejudice and/or discrimination, [and] internationally in the form of occupation, torture and killing’. ⁹¹ US politicians must immediately cease scapegoating Muslim Americans – including those within Congress – and stop targeting them with ‘love it or leave it’ ultra-nationalist and racist discourse.

The economic warfare waged by the US on Somalia was nothing short of disastrous. It strangled one of the largest sources of incoming material wealth for Somalis. The rationale of shutting down the operations of Al-Barakaat were proven, via the US government’s own investigation, to be utterly pointless and based on flimsy-to-non-existent evidence of ‘financing terrorism.’ This economic siege on the already vulnerable population of Somalia stood as a major source of material deprivation for Somalia and requires more than quiet apologies in governmental documents that most people will never read. Therefore, symbolic redress on a larger scale would be better late than never.

Families who lost family members due to the many documented US air strikes in the region should receive financial compensation and formal apology. This is an elementary requirement for reparations. However, material redress is not only owed to those families, but is owed to all Somalis living in Somalia and the United States. The rationale here is simple: the money-remittance system was a crucial lifeline for those in Somalia, receiving funds from their friends and families outside of Somalia (in the US, and elsewhere). Therefore, the problems here are interwoven and require financial redress to the larger Somali diaspora. If such a bold act was initiated, it would be nothing short of world building. There has been intergenerational harm inflicted on Somalia and its diaspora for multiple decades, therefore solely offering compensation to select families misses the larger point of world-building reparations. The point is to allow all Somalis to chart their own path forward, by acknowledging the wrong the US has inflicted upon them and providing resources and freedom to facilitate, in Táíwò’s words, ‘building the just world to come’. ⁹²

Another logic that could motivate the US government to offer reparations to Somalia is that there is often a significant economic incentive for Somali youth to join Al-Shabaab. ⁹³ Al-Shabaab often generates tens of millions of dollars annually, from various sources. ⁹⁴ Recruits often find themselves drawn to the possibility of steady and significant monthly income streams from participating in militant activities, rather than seeking employment in the traditional labour market. The economic incentive, coupled with the perception that the US and other governments in the Horn of Africa (e.g., Ethiopia and Kenya) are targeting Somalia as a Muslim country, are drivers of recruitment, not just in Somalia but also in the Somali diaspora. ⁹⁵

Conclusion

The modern world system was built on colonial and racist violence, capitalist hyper-exploitation and mass dispossession. While not the sole country responsible for these harms, the US government has played no small role in generating and upholding the world system. Most recently, the US has waged a decades-long ‘GWOT’ which radically destabilised the lives of millions of people across continents. In fact, one estimate claims that US ‘counter-terrorism’ activities – via military training exercises, interventions and drone strikes – has involved 40 per cent of the world’s countries. ⁹⁶ In Somalia, the impact of the US activities over the past several decades has caused great harm and created conditions that demand to know whether the US government owed reparations to Somalia.

The past-to-present counter-terrorism approach deployed by the US and its regional allies in the GWOT is untenable, causing mass displacement, violence and widespread resentment towards the US. In Somalia, ‘the absence of clear and coherent strategy on the part of the federal government and its international partners to deal with the insurgent movement’ makes it even easier for Al-Shabaab to recruit, and does little to create conditions for human flourishing. ⁹⁷ The special forces division of Somalia’s military tasked with targeting Al-Shabaab is barely functional without direct and ongoing US support, and most existing counter-terrorism measures continue to fail the stated goals of reducing political violence. ⁹⁸ Against this backdrop, Al-Shabaab continues its relentless campaign of political violence while collecting $100 million per year via ‘taxing’ the population. ⁹⁹

It should be noted that the documentation of US aggression towards Somalia offered in this article in no way expunges Al-Shabaab from guilt in its crimes and is not an endorsement of its politics. Quite the opposite, a comprehensive agenda for reparations can undercut much of the momentum that groups like Al-Shabaab receive, given how easily they recruit via (1) claiming the US military and their proxies in the Horn of Africa are waging an anti-Somali, anti-Muslim crusade, (2) offering monthly salaries to recruits that far exceeds the paltry wages offered in the feeble formal economy of Somalia and elsewhere. Furthermore, recent waves of world-systemic violence in the name of ‘political Islam’ have a distinctly dialectical relationship to the extinguishing of leftwing ideologies in the post-cold-war era, as well as the US’s military, economic and political interventions across the broader Middle East. ¹⁰⁰

Some may wonder whether a call for the US to provide financial reparations to Somalia is an unrealistic request. Dismissing the demands for restitution and reparations for any past wrongdoing carried out by the US government is a common theme throughout history, but this itself does not make it financially unfeasible. In late 2022 it was revealed that the US Department of Defense once again failed a financial audit, unable to account for over 60 per cent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. ¹⁰¹ Given that the US government has already spent trillions of dollars on the GWOT, with little success to show for it, the availability of rerouting resources to populations in need could be a reasonable request, if there is a widespread push for such an act.

Beyond the material reality of demands for reparations, the issue of whether or not it is ‘realistic’ in our current political-ideological coordinates also misses a second important point. To sketch a path forward – where the concept of ‘countering terrorism’ is reconsidered beyond its current deadlock, and restorative justice is taken seriously in the world system – is to engage in the important act of cognitive mapping. ¹⁰² The idea of providing reparations to Somalia could be conceived of as not only necessary but completely realistic, if we see it as a task that is required to help build a socially just system beyond the capabilities of the current capitalist world system.

There will be no easy solution to the situation in Somalia. Reparations will not be a cure-all, but might go a long way towards repairing frayed US-Somalia ties, and help make amends for the decades-long political, economic and ideological assault the US waged on the people of Somalia. We operate within world-systemic constraints not of our choosing, within which predation on Somalia may benefit a small sector of political-economic actors. This is what landed Somalia in its current predicament to begin with. Despite these enormous obstacles, the future of the world system is not set in stone. It is our collective responsibility to demand, work towards and create the just world in which we hope to live.