The United States has condemned the attack by Al-Shabaab on Kenyan soldiers in Somalia last Friday morning which left several of them d...
The United States has condemned the attack by Al-Shabaab on
Kenyan soldiers in Somalia last Friday morning which left several of
them dead adding that it would continue supporting Kenya's operations
inside Somalia.
State Department spokesman John Kirby
also offered the US's 'deepest condolences' to the families of Kenya
Defence Forces (KDF) soldiers killed at a base in Al-Ade in Somalia's
Gedo region.
Mr Kirby did not indicate how many Kenyan troops died in the attack.
The
US has directly supplied more than $500 million (Sh51 billion) worth of
military training, equipment and intelligence resources to the African
Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom), which comprises troops and police
from Kenya, Ethiopia, Burundi, Uganda, Djibouti, Sierra Leone, Nigeria
and Ghana.
Washington has provided a similar,
additional amount of assistance to Amisom through the United Nations,
bringing its contributions to the AU force in Somalia to over $1 billion
during the past eight years.
SUPPORT FOR AMISOM
Briefing
reporters at the State Department on Friday, Mr Kirby said the US
remains 'fully committed' to assisting Amisom as well as the governments
of Kenya and Somalia in combating terrorism and to enhance security
within Kenya as well as in Somalia.
But according to a
diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks in 2011, the US initially
opposed Kenyan military involvement in southern Somalia.
A
December 2009 communication recounts that a high-ranking State
Department official had told Kenya's then-Foreign Minister Moses
Wetangula that Nairobi's 'Jubaland initiative' was 'a bad idea that
would more likely add to Somalia's instability than to help stabilise
the country.'
Kenya was planning at the time to recruit
and train an ethnic Somali force to battle Shabaab in the Juba River
region of Somalia bordering Kenya.
The US later
expressed its support for the Kenyan troops’ presence in Somalia after
the KDF contingent there was formally incorporated into Amisom.
Johnnie
Carson, then the State Department's top Africa official, said at a news
conference in Nairobi in 2012 that the US was 'very pleased' that
Kenyan forces had begun operating in Somalia under Amisom's guidance.
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