Half a million people lost their lives and a million more were forced to flee the country, but the SOMALIA conflict remains almost unresolved in oblivion, even though a small battle in the capital, Muqdisho, managed to be the best seller with books, movies and video games Black Hawk Down. Forgotten or hidden from the news, but very guarded by the military of the Empire because they have made it the laboratory of their new strategies.

SOMALIA has been cited as a model of failed states, without giving too many explanations of what has led its country to touch the fund. Since General Mohamed Siad Barre lost power in 1990, the country has not found minimal stability, on the one hand the American military and the neighbouring countries – Kenya, Ethiopia… – in the first place to support the transitional government and now the federal government, on the other hand the small armies of local tribes and guerrillas linked to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

Last October the New York Times clarified the importance of that lost war at a distance, in the chronicle “Somalian EE.UU. is strengthening the shadow war” signed by Mark Mazzeti, Jeffrey Gettleman and Eric Schmitt: "The SOMALIA campaign is a model of war that lehendakari Obama has embraced and that is going to happen to the successor. That is the model used today by the United States, as in the Middle East, in North Africa – from Syria to Libya – to overcome Obama’s displeasure of putting the Americans’ feet in the war zones of the world. This same year, the United States has carried out air strikes in seven countries and special operation missions in many more.”

Since the Americans lost in 1993 in the capital, Muqdisho, a helicopter trying to evacuate by guerrilla missiles, with the 18 soldiers inside, has long been the priority of American forces not to kill men in distant battles, but years have not passed and have shown in Somalia that they are prepared to enter new dangers.

In the Obama era, the US President has acquired broader power to exert violence in SOMALIA, to officially protect US and African troops from attacks by Islamist guerrillas Al Shabab. “The Pentagon,” says New York Times, when giving the news of war, blurs these operations into the name of ‘self-defense attack,’ but there are analysts who believe that this way of speaking is not for it to become a reality over time more than that prophecy.”

With about 9,000 soldiers, Al Shabab, a Al-Qaeda group, will be the most successful in Somalia against the Americans and the government established by the African Union Mission AMISOM to SOMALIA. In recent years he has suffered several military defeats, lost control of the tripod and a Yanki drone has recently killed leader Moktar Ali Zubeyr, but has not lost his military capacity. In 2013 he arrived in the capital of Kenya Al-Shabab, where 60 people died in the attack on the city.

The United States has 300 special operations military personnel to act against Al Shabab, in cooperation with soldiers from Kenya, Uganda and others, who are supported by AMISOM in SOMALIA. Every month, more than half a dozen attacks are organized, which complement drone ground operations from the air. These operations involve the special unit of the U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6, on which the information is classified as secret. They are also involved in the interrogation of detainees in the fighting.

The new logic of subcontracted wars

Several experts warn that these air strikes, although justified as self-defence, will necessarily lead to a hardening of the war and that the elite Yankees who have come to the aid of African military forces will increasingly turn to Al Shabab's watchpoint.

The fact is that in SOMALIA, along with American and African military personnel, there are also private contractors specialized in the war. Mercenaries. In particular, the New York Times mentioned the Washington based Bancroft Global Development company: “It has been working for years with the State Department in the training and mixing of African Union troops in SOMALIA military operations.”

Bancroft’s leader, Michael Stock, has confessed to journalists who have formed a Somali group called Danab. After conducting the first training following recruitment at Muqdishon, they are transported to the Baledogl military base, which has better prepared them with the U.S. marines to immerse themselves in the battles against the Al Shabab guerrillas. Stock has said that the aim is to organize a Somali military unit so that the pettes made in Afghanistan and Iraq are not repeated against those in Al Shabab, in which the United States of America and the United States.

In the new wars of the Somali model, the empire behaves like an incognito and gets the issues to lose the interest of the allied countries such as the United States. There is hardly any media in these situations. Funding goes through the secret accounts of the CIA and the Army, often handed over to a partner like Saudi Arabia. Responsibilities for acts of war are privatized by outsourcing entire parts of the war to private contractors.

In December, the American media Mint Press News has completed these analyses with a clarifying detail: “The Secret Empire AFRICOM: How the United States Army has made Africa the laboratory of modern warfare.” AFRICOM is one of the 9 U.S. battle commands that guides the operations of the 53 African countries from Germany.

According to journalist and university professor Nick Turse, the Obama administration in Africa has greatly increased the presence of American military personnel in recent years. The Americans are located in more than 60 areas in 38 countries, but not as they have so far, but in military bases.

Outside the base of Djibouti, there are no large concentrations of troops, weapons or aircraft. On the contrary, these 60 discreet places, baptized by military with seductive denominations nenúfares (‘lily pad’), are located in any airport, pier, base or fuel supply headquarters in Africa, both at a medical research center in Egypt and in a port in Kenya: The small structures of the United States Army are ready to assemble and deploy a much larger military force as needed.

The Pentagon already has a plan to reorganize the command of the war against the Islamists in four major areas of Europe. The node of conflict control in Africa with the new strategy could be in southern Europe, perhaps in Spain.