Eritrea yesterday slammed the US for providing weapons to Somalia’s beleaguered government in its battle against Islamist insurgents.
Washington announced on Thursday that it was sending the Horn of Africa nation an “urgent supply” of weapons and ammunition at the request of Mogadishu as armed groups closed in on the transitional government’s strongholds.
“US misguided acts of intervention and supply of weapons have not, in the past years, advanced the cause of stability in Somalia,” the Eritrean foreign affairs ministry said in a statement.
“A repeat of those measures will not produce positive results but only aggravate and prolong the crisis,” it added.
On May 7, the Shebaab, a hardline Islamist armed group, and Hezb al-Islam, a more political group, launched an unprecedented nationwide offensive against the administration of President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed.
The internationally-backed Sharif has been holed up in his presidential quarters, protected by African Union peacekeepers as his forces were unable to reassert their authority on the capital.
Around 300 people are confirmed to have been killed in the latest violence, many of them civilians.
The US has also approached Eritrea with “concerns” that it is aiding the insurgents and warned that such support would be a “serious obstacle” to better ties, a US State Department spokesman said on Thursday.
But Eritrea again dismissed the allegations. “These pronouncements do not contain novel or substantive elements,” it said.
Ties between the two countries have in recent years been frosty, with Eritrea accusing the US of backing its arch-foe Ethiopia in a long-running border dispute.
The US government has provided about 40 tonnes of weapons and ammunition to Somalia in the past six weeks to help it fight Islamist insurgents, a senior US official had said earlier on Friday in Washington.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the US spent less than $10mn on what he described as small arms and ammunition as well as on payments to other nations to train Somali government forces.
The senior State Department official told reporters the US began providing the arms soon after Shebaab insurgents began their offensive in May.
The official said Washington feared that it could destabilize the region and turn Somalia into a safe haven for foreign Islamists and “global terrorists.”
“We’ve shipped probably in the neighbourhood of 40 tonnes worth of arms and munitions into Somalia,” the official said.
“We remain concerned about the prospects of a Shebaab victory, and we want to do as much as we can to help the government.”
The US funded the purchase of arms for the Somali government and also asked the Ugandan and Burundian troops in the country to give the government weapons and then reimbursed them, the official said.
He said the US also set aside money to pay the Ugandan and Burundian units to train government forces rather than having US troops conduct the training.
The US official said he had heard estimates of between 200 and 400 foreign fighters in Somalia but that his personal view was that the figure probably was less than 200.
Source: Gulf-Times.com
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