Response to Voice of America
On Wednesday, 28th August 2024, US-funded media Voice of America (VOA) wrote an article titled: “African Stream distorts U.S. military’s mission in Somalia”
They then republished the piece in video format on 30th August 2024, under the same title. They didn’t reach out to us for comment.
Who is Priscilla Mines
The article author’s name is Priscilla Mines, which we suspect is a pseudonym, as there is no digital footprint online. The name only appears online on the VOA website, and there is no online photo. We suspect it is Purity Mwambia who wrote the article. She has a digital footprint and pictures online, and she uses her public platforms to boast about speaking at U.S. State Department forums in Washington. She writes weekly pieces for VOA, usually defending the US State Department position. She initially listed this article as produced by Purity Mwambia but then deleted it, as shown in the screenshots (attached at the bottom). Interestingly, no article from Purity is listed for the week of 27th August 2024.
The last smear piece she wrote against our colleague, David Hundeyin, received a comprehensive response from him, which was very enjoyable to read. We suspect she didn’t want to go through that again, especially as she is from Kenya, where African Stream operates.
For the sake of our response, we will use her preferred pseudonym, Priscilla Mines.
We know that the article was written for the US-funded VOA platform. It alleges that African Stream is “distorting [the] U.S. military’s mission in Somalia.” Therefore, it should be seen as a US government response to critical coverage of US military operations abroad.
Our Response to the Article
The VOA article quotes African Stream’s statement that “It is now a bipartisan tradition for each new US president, whether Republican or Democrat, to rain drone bombs down on the East African country in which millions of civilians are simply struggling to survive.” Then it claims that “That is false,” without explaining what is false about it.
Nowhere in the VOA article does Mines deny the last four US presidents – namely, George W. Bush (Republican), Barack Hussein Obama (Democrat), Donald J. Trump (Republican), and Joe Biden (Democrat) – oversaw the continued and sustained drone bombing of Somalia. Thus, the statement that we made – that bombing Somalia has become a bipartisan tradition taken up by each new president – is categorically true.
Unable to respond to our claims and rushing quickly to throw readers off track, VOA threw together a shoddy article full of spelling errors such as, “In a resent post on X, the African Stream shared a collage showing former American presidents George W. Bush, a Republican, and Barak Obama…” The article is so carelessly written that neither Mines nor the editors seem to know the difference between ‘recent’ and ‘resent’ or even how to spell former US President Barack Obama’s name. They then proceed to ignore our factual statement that every US president since W. Bush has bombed Somalia, to shift focus to Al-Shabaab instead.
VOA’s Straw man: Al-Shabaab
Mines is unable to deny this simple fact, so she seeks to divert attention away from civilian casualties to get the VOA readership riled up over Al-Shabaab. Let us be unequivocal: African Stream in no way defends Al-Shabaab. However, Mines conveniently leaves out the fact that Al-Shabaab exists as a response to US intervention in the Horn of Africa. Had the United States not come into Somalia or encouraged Ethiopia to go into Somalia to destroy the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), there would not have been a power vacuum and fertile ground for a violent terrorist group like Al-Shabaab to rise. Simply put, Al-Shabaab is a reactionary by-product of US intervention.
Another classic case of the United States appearing where there was no serious threat of terrorism and somehow seeming, once again, to create the problem they claim to be there to combat. Terrorism has grown and spread exponentially across Africa ever since the United States declared its so-called ‘war on terror’ back in 2001, and began its counterterrorism assistance to places like Niger in 2002/2003. According to the US State Department, there were just nine terrorist attacks in the whole of Africa in 2002 and 2003.
Yet, by 2022, after 20 years of US ‘support’ and eight years of French ‘support’ – in just Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso – around 7,900 people had been killed in terrorist attacks.
Similarly, Al-Shabaab only came into existence in 2006, five years after the so-called ‘war on terror’ began. With this in mind, the idea that even more US intervention in Somalia will somehow be ‘good’ this time is unconvincing and a hard sell.
Just How Many Civilians Do US Drones Kill in Somalia?
Neither Mines, VOA, nor the US military can deny that US drone strikes kill civilians in Somalia. Even the VOA article states, “Since 2020, AFRICOM said its drone attacks killed 3 civilians and injured 11 others in Somalia.” According to Airwars, an organisation based in the UK which monitors air strikes, AFRICOM has admitted to killing civilians on five separate occasions in Somalia: on 1st April 2018, 23rd February 2019, 2nd February 2020, 17th February 2020, and 1st January 2021. Up to four civilians may have been killed in the April 2018 attack alone, and AFRICOM cannot even confirm the number of civilian casualties during the two most recent attacks. We wonder why VOA has not included some of these reported incidents in their article?
The bigger problem with these numbers is that the admitted kill count does not reflect reality. Nick Turse’s research indicates that three to five civilians were killed during one air strike in April 2018 alone. According to Airwars, the actual number of civilian deaths caused by US air strikes may be up to 3,000 per cent greater than the professed five casualties that AFRICOM is willing to admit. Based on this source, a conservative estimate of civilian casualties would indicate that 87 lives have been taken but up to 398 Somali civilians may have been killed in total.
We do not know for sure, and we may never really know, just how many innocent people AFRICOM has killed. It is impossible to know because, unfortunately, AFRICOM does not bother to thoroughly verify how many civilians they have murdered. According to Amnesty International’s International’s Director for East and Southern Africa, Deprose Muchena, “Not only does AFRICOM utterly fail at its mission to report civilian casualties in Somalia, but it doesn’t seem to care about the fate of the numerous families it has completely torn apart.”
In 2020, Vice News interviewed Mohammad Osman from Jilib, Middle Juba, Somalia. A missile blew up Osman’s family home while his relatives were eating, injuring his mother-in-law and two of his children, while a third child was killed. Was this child eating dinner a member of Al-Shabaab? His death was not listed as one of the admitted AFRICOM civilian casualties. Osman claims his family members are simple farmers who sometimes raise livestock and have no possible ties with Al-Shabaab. Is Mohammad Osman lying? Will AFRICOM offer any proof that they did not kill an innocent child eating dinner with his family in Middle Juba, on 2nd February 2020? And if AFRICOM is inaccurate, uninformed, or even intentionally obfuscating the truth, how many Mohammad Osmans are out there? How many people in Somalia must continue living day in and day out, knowing the US military has murdered a loved one?
And for the victims’ relatives who’ve come forward, such as the family of 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamad and her four-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse, whom AFRICOM killed on 1st April 2018, what justice has been served? Their families have been begging AFRICOM to apologise and explain the deaths of their family members for the past six years, to no avail. On the day of the attack, AFRICOM announced simply that they had killed “five terrorists”. When the death of this child was brought to their attention, the knowledge of the casualties was withheld from Congress and the general public for a year due to a “reporting error.” Are we then supposed to trust that AFRICOM is being generally honest about preventing and reporting all civilian casualties? On what pretext can AFRICOM continue to kill Somali children in the alleged fight against Al-Shabaab?
Do Somali Lives Matter?
Priscilla Mines attacked us for highlighting the US bombing in Somalia. The question is, will she also attack Somali Legal Action Network, Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, Somali Awareness, Social Development Organization (SASDO) and an additional 20 leading human-rights organisations? They jointly wrote this letter in December 2023:
Dear Secretary Austin,
The undersigned Somali and international human rights and protection of civilians organisations write to request that you take immediate steps to address the requests of families whose loved ones were killed or injured by U.S. airstrikes in Somalia. New reporting illustrates how in multiple cases of civilian harm in Somalia confirmed by the U.S. government, civilian victims, survivors, and their families have yet to receive answers, acknowledgement, and amends despite their sustained efforts to reach authorities over several years.
Even if AFRICOM is willing to admit to three to five deaths, we’re calling AFRICOM’s bluff. But what number of Somalis need to die before anger is justified? Is one life lost not precious enough for public outrage? Okay, what about two? Six? Six-hundred? Priscilla Mines, give us a number so we know how many Somali civilians must be killed first, before we can be rightfully upset about it.
Let’s be honest: AFRICOM is losing the propaganda war. It is faced with widespread unpopularity, righteous loathing and, for the first time, an eviction notice from Niger. US military operations in Africa have garnered an embarrassing reputation, most notably with the US’ lead role in the destruction and destabilisation of Libya, which has led to the North African country’s collapse and complete devastation for millions of people. This does not even include the widespread blowback throughout the continent, notably in the Sahel, which has become the world centre of terrorist attacks in the aftermath of the US-NATO intervention, at least according to the Global Terrorism Index published by The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP). According to a study by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, terrorism in Africa has increased by 100,000 per cent since the US war on terror began. Suppose we are to believe AFRICOM and this VOA article’s claim that “the U.S. conducts drone strikes in Somalia to protect civilians from terrorists.” In that case, it is safe to say that the US military is failing miserably at its self-proclaimed mission. And it is probably best that Somalia go the way of Niger and address this crisis without further US involvement.
What’s at Stake for VOA?
One sentence that sticks out in the VOA article is, “But African Stream, a popular online publication registered in the U.K. as owned by Ahmed Kaballo, a former contributor of the Iranian state-owned Press T.V., distorted the U.S. role in combating al-Shabab in Somalia.” The mention of Press TV is notable here, considering that African Stream has no affiliation with and receives no funding from any state or government, whether Iran or elsewhere, something that cannot be said about VOA, which is practically the media wing of the US State Department, both in its funding and its message. The VOA was founded directly by former US president, Gerald Ford. Today, it gets its funding from The United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which gets it directly from the US Congress. USAGM is considered an arm of US diplomacy. Describing the purpose of VOA, the USAGM website states, “The long-range interests of the United States are served by communicating directly with the peoples of the world by radio.” Are we to pretend that the “long-range interests of the United States” are identical to the “long-range interests” of Somalia and the rest of Africa? A quick glimpse at the last few centuries of world history, and the basic layout of the US versus Africa’s economy, would suggest otherwise.
Screenshot before deletion
Screenshot after deletion
