America has quietly increased the number of special forces in Somalia to resist jihadis:
The number of U.S. military forces in Somalia has more than doubled this year to over 500 people as the Pentagon has quietly posted hundreds of additional special operations personnel to advise local forces in pockets of Islamic militants around the country, according to current and former senior military officials.
The article notes that this in relation to the "Black Hawk Down" battle in Mogadishu where 18 American troops were killed in 1993. The American government gave the order to get our of there after that rather than exploit the lopsided casualty rate (although the mission wasn't worth it in the first place, truth be told, even if we could have carried it out). The implication is that we are returning to the site of a "catastrophe," as the article puts it.
Not mentioned is that our troops killed at least 500 enemy gunmen in that rolling ambush. I don't think Somali jihadis are really eager to repeat that kind of "victory."
So let's kill more jihadis. They're the only good kind.
UPDATE: This is timely:
Somalia's government said on Wednesday it had requested the U.S. air strike which killed more than 100 suspected militants on the previous day to help pave the way for an upcoming ground offensive against Islamist militant group al Shabaab.
The United States military's Africa Command said on Tuesday it had killed more than 100 of the al Qaeda-linked insurgents in an air strike on a camp 125 miles (200 km) northwest of the capital Mogadishu.
I didn't catch the AFRICOM statement on Tuesday.
