This is a quick one I wanted to put out. I was talking with friends the other day about the Ugandans in Iraq, and how significant their work is to the economy of Uganda. The money brought in from security work, surpasses what is made off their chief export called coffee, and that is pretty significant. So the question is, what happens when the work dries up in Iraq? All of these Ugandan guards are going to be looking for work, and most of the security work in Afghanistan is going to the local nationals.
So this is what I am starting to piece together, and I am going to take a guess as to where all these guards are going to go next. I think the plan all along was to professionalize Ugandans for a whole slew of tasks that AFRICOM and the west has in mind for East Africa. From dealing with Jihadists in Somalia with the AU force, to providing recruits for the Ugandan Army so they can deal with the LRA and others, to protecting this new ‘hot oil zone’ in East Africa. Ugandans are gonna be in high demand, and we have effectively trained them up with the work in Iraq. Intentional or not, I thought it was interesting to make the connection for the big picture.
This is not to say that this was the official strategy of the US and AFRICOM all along. But you have to look at these three stories below, and not think ‘how convenient’? lol The coming resource war is all about securing our place at the oil trough and making sure there are competent forces to protect that stuff. Thanks to Iraq, we now have a ton of ready made guards or ‘soldiers’ to make that happen. Let me know what you guys think. –Matt
Edit: 06/11/2010- This is an excellent run down of the current dynamics of oil in this East Africa region. Good job to Jody.
By Jody Ray Bennett for ISN Security Watch
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East Africa is next hot oil zone
March. 10, 2010
NAIROBI, Kenya, March 10 (UPI) — East Africa is emerging as the next oil boom following a big strike in Uganda’s Lake Albert Basin. Other oil and natural gas reserves have been found in Tanzania and Mozambique and exploration is under way in Ethiopia and even war-torn Somalia.
The region, until recently largely ignored by the energy industry, is “the last real high-potential area in the world that hasn’t been fully explored,” says Richard Schmitt, chief executive officer of Dubai’s Black Marlin Energy, which is prospecting in East Africa.
The discovery at Lake Albert, in the center of Africa between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, is estimated to contain the equivalent of several billion barrels of oil. It is likely to be the biggest onshore field found south of the Sahara Desert in two decades.
Tullow Oil, the British exploration company backed by a $1.4 billion loan from the Royal Bank of Scotland, says its Ngassa field in Uganda may be the biggest find in the Lake Albert Basin to date with up to 600 million barrels.
Tullow has discovered reserves equivalent to around 2 billion barrels of oil in Uganda in the last four years. Most of the initial finds in East Africa were made by independent wildcatters like Tullow and another British firm, Heritage Oil, run by former mercenary Tony Buckingham.
Now the majors are moving in. Heritage recently sold its 50 percent share in two Lake Albert Basin fields to Eni of Italy for $1.5 billion.
Eni said the two blocks have the potential to produce 1 billion barrels and is fighting it out with Tullow for control of the reserves on the Ugandan side of Lake Albert.
The Italian company is busy expanding in sub-Saharan Africa and has interests in Angola, Nigeria, Gabon, Mozambique and the Republic of Congo.
The Ugandan government is negotiating with several majors with the financial clout to handle the enormous investment required to develop these emerging fields.
Front-runners reportedly include China’s state-run CNOOC, Total of France and Exxon Mobil of the United States.
Andarko Petroleum Corp. of Texas says it has hit a giant natural gas field off the coast of Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony that became independent in 1975. Norway’s Statoil is drilling in Mozambique’s Rovuma Basin.
Since the 2006 find at Lake Albert, one of the Great Lakes of Africa strung out along the Great Rift Valley, there have been at least 15 confirmed major strikes in the region.
The Indian Ocean island of Madagascar contains “enormous reserves,” according to Tiziana Luzzi-Arbouille of IHS Global Insight consultancy of London.
“What happened in Uganda made it easier for smaller companies to raise funding,” said Tewodros Ashenafi, head of Southwest Energy, an Ethiopian company exploring in the Ogaden Basin in the east of the country.
This is a vast 135,000-square-mile territory in landlocked Ethiopia that is believed to contain sizable reserves of oil. It is estimated to hold 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas as well.
Malaysia’s Petronas, which recently acquired major blocks in Iraq, signed an exploration agreement with Addis Ababa in August 2007.
The main problem for the oil industry is that the Ogaden, like many parts of Africa, is a conflict zone, as it has been pretty much since the Cold War in the 1970s. This is one reason why exploration has been so tardy.
Separatist rebels of the Ogaden National Liberation Front have warned oil companies to keep away and in April 2007 attacked a Chinese exploration group, killing 74 people.
Petronas is also exploring in the Gambella Basin of western Ethiopia.
Somalia has been torn by wars between feuding militias and clans since dictator Siad Barre was toppled in 1991 but it is also considered to hold considerable oil reserves.
A 1993 study by Petroconsultants of Geneva concluded that Somalia has two of the most potentially interesting hydrocarbon-yielding basins in the entire region — one in the central Mudugh region, the other in the Gulf of Aden.
That was one of 10 such basins across Somalia, southeast Ethiopia and northeast Kenya.
More recent analyses indicate that Somalia could have reserves of up to 10 billion barrels.
But exploration remains an extremely hazardous undertaking. And it’s likely to become more so as the country becomes a major focus for U.S. counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaida and its affiliates who are dug in there.
Story here.
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Friday, 12 March 2010
Rick Rozoff
Africom’s First War: U.S. Directs Large-Scale Offensive In Somalia
Rick Rozoff
Over 43 people have been killed in the Somali capital of Mogadishu in the past two days in fighting between Shabab (al-Shabaab) insurgent forces, who on March 10 advanced to within one mile of the nation’s presidential palace, and troops of the U.S.-backed Transitional Federal Government. The fighting has just begun.
The last ambassador of the United States to Somalia (1994-1995), Daniel H. Simpson, penned a column for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on March 10 in which which he posed the question “why, apart from the only lightly documented charge of Islamic extremism among the Shabab, is the United States reengaging in Somalia at this time?”
He answered it in stating “Part of the reason is because the United States has its only base in Africa up the coast from Mogadishu, in Djibouti, the former French Somaliland. The U.S. Africa Command was established there in 2008, and, absent the willingness of other African countries to host it, the base in Djibouti became the headquarters for U.S. troops and fighter bombers in Africa.
“Flush with money, in spite of the expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense obviously feels itself in a position to undertake military action in Africa, in Somalia.” [1]
Fulfilling its appointed role, the New York Times leaked U.S. military plans for the current offensive in Somalia on March 5 in a report titled “U.S. Aiding Somalia in Its Plan to Retake Its Capital.” (Note that the Transitional Federal Government is presented as Somalia itself and Mogadishu as its capital.)
The tone of the feature was of course one of approval and endorsement of the Pentagon’s rationale for directly intervening in Somalia at a level not seen since 1993 and support for proxy actions last witnessed with the invasion by Ethiopia in 2006. The report began with a description of a military surveillance plane circling over the Somali capital and a quote from the new chief of staff of the nation’s armed forces, General Mohamed Gelle Kahiye: “It’s the Americans. They’re helping us.”
Afterward “An American official in Washington, who said he was not authorized to speak publicly” – a hallmark of the American free press – was, if not identified, quoted as maintaining that U.S. covert operations were planned if not already underway and “What you’re likely to see is airstrikes and Special Ops moving in, hitting and getting out.” [2]
The New York Times also provided background information regarding the current offensive:
“Over the past several months, American advisers have helped supervise the training of the Somali forces to be deployed in the offensive….The Americans have provided covert training to Somali intelligence officers, logistical support to the peacekeepers, fuel for the maneuvers, surveillance information about insurgent positions and money for bullets and guns.” [3]
Four days later General William (“Kip”) Ward, commander of United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
In his introductory remarks the chairman of the committee, Senator Carl Levin, reinforced recent American attempts to expand the scope of the deepening Afghanistan-Pakistan war, the deadliest and lengthiest in the world, to the west and south in stating that “al Qaeda and violent extremists who share their ideology are not just located in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region but in places like Somalia, Mali, Nigeria and Niger.” [4]
In his formal report Ward pursued a similar tact and expanded the Pentagon’s “counter-terrorism” (CT) area of responsibility yet further from South Asia: “U.S. Africa Command has focused the majority of its CT capacity building activities in East Africa on Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Uganda, which – aside from Somalia – are the countries directly threatened by terrorists.” [5]
He also spoke of the current offensive by “the transition government to reclaim parts of Mogadishu,” stating “I think it’s something that we would look to do and support.” [6]
Senator Levin and General Ward included eight African nations in the broader Afghan war category of Operation Enduring Freedom, countries from the far northeast of the continent (the Horn of Africa) to the far west (the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea). The U.S. military has already been involved in counterinsurgency operations in Mali and Niger against ethnic Tuareg rebels, who have no conceivable ties to al-Qaeda, not that one would know that from Levin’s comments.
In between South Asia and Africa lies Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula. The New York Times report cited earlier reminded readers that “The United States is increasingly concerned about the link between Somalia and Yemen.” Indeed as Levin’s comments quoted above establish, Washington (along with its NATO allies) is forging an expanded war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and into Africa. [7]
That extension of the South Asia war has not gone unobserved in world capitals, and earlier this year Russian political analyst Andrei Fedyashin commented: “Adding up all four fronts – if the United States ventured an attack on Yemen and Somalia – America would have to invade a territory equal to three-fourths of Western Europe; and it is hardly strong enough for that.” [8]
Strong enough or not, that is just what the White House and the Pentagon are doing. The only other objection that can be raised to the above author’s description is that it too severely narrows the intended battlefront.
In the past six months Somali troops have been sent to Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda for combat training and “most are now back in the capital, waiting to fight.”
In addition, “There are also about 5,000 Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers, with 1,700 more on their way, and they are expected to play a vital role in backing up advancing Somali forces.” [9]
Last October the U.S. led ten days of military exercises in Uganda – Natural Fire 10 – with 450 American troops and over 550 from Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. The U.S. soldiers were deployed from Camp Lemonier (Lemonnier) in Djibouti, home to the Pentagon’s Joint Task Force/Horn of Africa and over 2,000 U.S. forces. The de facto headquarters of AFRICOM.
At the time of the maneuvers a major Ugandan newspaper wrote that they were “geared towards the formation of the first Joint East African Military Force.” [10]
In addition to using such a multinational regional force in Somalia, the U.S. can also deploy it against Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels in Uganda, Congo and Sudan, and could even employ it against Eritrea, Zimbabwe and Sudan, along with Somalia the only nations on the African continent not to some degree enmeshed in military partnerships with Washington and NATO. (Libya has participated in NATO naval exercises and South Africa has hosted the bloc’s warships.) [11]
Earlier this month the Kenyan newspaper The East African divulged that “American legislators are pushing for a law that will see another phase of military action to apprehend Lord’s Resistance Army rebels.”
The news source added that the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Bill adopted by the U.S. Congress last year “requires the US government to develop a new multifaceted strategy” and as such the new bill under consideration “will not be the first time the US government is providing support to the Uganda army in fighting the LRA.
“The US has been backing the UPDF [Uganda People’s Defence Force] with logistics and training to fight the rebel group.” [12]
Last month it was announced that the U.S. Africa Command has dispatched special forces to train 1,000 Congolese troops in the north and east of their nation, where Congo borders Uganda.
Former U.S. diplomat Daniel Simpson was quoted above as to what in part is Washington’s motive in pursuing a new war in and around Somalia: To test out AFRICOM ground and air forces in Djibouti for direct military action on the continent.
A United Press International report of March 10, placed under energy news, offered another explanation. In a feature titled “East Africa is next hot oil zone,” the news agency disclosed that “East Africa is emerging as the next oil boom following a big strike in Uganda’s Lake Albert Basin. Other oil and natural gas reserves have been found in Tanzania and Mozambique and exploration is under way in Ethiopia and even war-torn Somalia.”
The region is, in the words of the Western chief executive officer of an oil prospecting firm, “the last real high-potential area in the world that hasn’t been fully explored.” [13]
The article added: “The discovery at Lake Albert, in the center of Africa between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, is estimated to contain the equivalent of several billion barrels of oil. It is likely to be the biggest onshore field found south of the Sahara Desert in two decades.”
It also spoke of “a vast 135,000-square-mile territory in landlocked Ethiopia that is believed to contain sizable reserves of oil. It is estimated to hold 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas as well.”
And, more pertinent to the Horn of Africa:
“A 1993 study by Petroconsultants of Geneva concluded that Somalia has two of the most potentially interesting hydrocarbon-yielding basins in the entire region – one in the central Mudugh region, the other in the Gulf of Aden More recent analyses indicate that Somalia could have reserves of up to 10 billion barrels.” [14]
Washington’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies are also deeply involved in the militarization of East Africa.
On March 10 NATO extended its naval operation in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia, Ocean Shield, to the end of 2012, an unprecedentedly long 33-month extension. On March 12 “Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 will take over missions from Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 for the four-month assignment. The change will increase NATO’s contribution from four ships to five ships….” [15]
At the same hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee that AFRICOM commander William Ward addressed, NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, America’s Admiral James Stavridis, “noted that 100,000 NATO troops are involved in expeditionary operations on three continents, including operations in Afghanistan, off the coast of Africa, and in Bosnia.” (Evidently Kosovo was meant for Bosnia.)
Stavridis, who is concurrently top military chief of U.S. European Command, said “The nature of threats in this 21st century [is] going to demand more than just sitting behind our borders.” [16]
He also said he finds “Iran alarming in any number of dimensions,” specifically mentioning alleged “state-sponsored terrorism, nuclear proliferation and political outreach into Latin America.” [17]
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently returned from Jordan and the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain where he pressured both nations to support the war in Afghanistan and Alliance naval operations.
NATO’s top official said [on March 9] that he has asked Jordan and Bahrain to contribute to alliance naval operations fighting terrorism and piracy in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf of Aden, as he ended a visit to the two countries. NATO is keen to improve cooperation with Arab and Muslim states, seeing them as important allies for a number of missions, including the all-important deployment in Afghanistan.” [18]
Regarding the Western military bloc’s almost nine-year Operation Active Endeavor in the entire Mediterranean Sea and its Operation Ocean Shield in the Gulf of Aden, Rasmussen said, “We would very much like to strengthen cooperation (with Bahrain and Jordan) within these operations.” [19]
While in Jordan he was strengthening military ties with NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue partnership – Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia – and in Bahrain firming up the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative aimed at the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have military personnel serving under NATO in Afghanistan.
In late February a delegation of the 53-nation African Union (AU) visited NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Mons, Belgium.
“NATO continues to support the AU mission in Somalia (AMISOM) through the provision of strategic sea- and air-lift for AMISOM Troop Contributing Nations on request. The last airlift support occurred in June 2008 when NATO transported a battalion of Burundian peacekeepers to Mogadishu.” [20]
On March 10 AMISON deployed tanks to prevent the capture of the Somali presidential palace by rebels.
The North Atlantic military bloc, which in recent years has conducted large-scale exercises in West Africa and inaugurated its international Response Force in Cape Verde in 2006, also supports “the operationalisation of the African Standby Force – the African Union’s vision for a continental, on-call security apparatus similar to the NATO Response Force.” [21]
In May the European Union, whose membership largely overlaps with that of NATO and which is engaged in intense integration with the military bloc on a global scale [22], will begin training 2,000 Somali troops in Uganda.
Brigadier General Thierry Caspar-Fille-Lambie, commanding officer of French armed forces in Djibouti, said “the Somali troops will be trained with the necessary military skills to help pacify and stabilize the volatile country.”
He issued that statement “at the closing ceremony of four-week French operational training of 1,700 Ugandan troops to be deployed” to Somalia in May. The French ambassador to Uganda said “The EU troops shall work in close collaboration with UPDF to train Somali troops.” [23]
The 2,000 soldiers to be trained by the EU will represent a full third of a projected 6,000-troop Somali army.
The U.S.-NATO-EU global triad plans an even larger collective military role in the new scramble for Africa. On March 4 and 5 a delegation from AFRICOM met with European Union officials in Brussels “seeking EU cooperation in Africa,” specifically in “areas where cooperation could be possible, notably with the soon-to-be-launched EU mission to train Somali troops.” [24]
Tony Holmes, AFRICOM’s deputy to the commander for civil-military activities, said “Somalia, that’s an area where we’re going to be doing a lot more, the European Union is already doing a lot and will be doing more….
“Somalia is very important for us. The European Union is involved in training Somalis in Uganda and that’s something we might be able to work closely with to support.”
The AFRICOM delegation, including Major-General Richard Sherlock, director of strategy, plans and programs, also discussed “counter-terrorism cooperation with the EU in the Sahel region, notably in Mauritania, Mali and Niger…” [25]
In late January the chairman of NATO’s Military Committee, Admiral Giampaolo Di Paola, said “that the Alliance is in discussion with a Gulf state to deploy AWACS planes for a reconnaissance mission over Afghanistan in support of its ISAF mission and also for anti-piracy off Somalia.” [24]
To demonstrate that NATO’s anti-piracy operation off the coast of Somalia has other designs than the one acknowledged, early this year a NATO spokesman announced that the bloc’s naval contingent in the Gulf of Aden “now has an additional task” to intervene against a fictional deployment of Somali fighters across the Gulf to Yemen.
The spokesman, Jacqui Sheriff, said “NATO warships will be on the lookout for anything suspicious.” [25]
As though Somali al-Shabaab fighters have nothing else to do as the U.S. is engineering an all-out assault on them in their homeland.
Five days after the New York Times feature detailed American war plans in Somalia, the Washington Times followed up on and added to that report.
U.S. operations are “likely to be the most overt demonstration of U.S. military backing since the ill-fated Operation Restore Hope of 1992….”
“Unmanned U.S. surveillance aircraft have been seen circling over Mogadishu in recent days, apparently pinpointing insurgent positions as the TFG [Transitional Federal Government] marshals its forces. U.S. Army advisers have been helping train the TFG’s forces, which have been largely equipped with millions of dollars’ worth of U.S. arms airlifted into Mogadishu over the last few weeks.”
The newspaper report further stated: “It’s not clear when the offensive will start. The word on the street is sometime in the next few weeks….”
The campaign has already begun.
“After securing Mogadishu, the offensive, supported by militias allied with the government, for now, at least, is likely to continue against al-Shebab in the countryside west and south toward the border with Kenya.” [26]
After the capital, the entire country. After Somalia, the region.
The war has just begun.
Story here.
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Why 10,000 Ugandans are eagerly serving in Iraq
Thousands of men and women from poverty-stricken Uganda risk their lives for $600 a month in Iraq.
By Max Delany
March 6, 2009
Kampala, Uganda
Under a relentless equatorial sun and the gaze of her Zimbabwean instructor, Juliet Kituye quickly reassembles her AK-47. Next to her, a young man in a ripped red T-shirt discharges imaginary rounds at an invisible target.
On a disused soccer pitch in the suburbs of the Ugandan capital, Kampala, 300 hopefuls are being put through rudimentary firearms training. Many of the recruits are raw and their drills occasionally lurch towards slapstick. One trainee lets the magazine slip out of his automatic rifle and onto the red earth, someone else about turns right instead of left. All of them share the same dream, however: going to Iraq.
As President Barack Obama announces plans to withdraw US troops from Iraq, thousands of young Ugandans are increasingly desperate to be sent to the war-torn country. Already, the Ugandan government says there are more than 10,000 men and women from this poverty-stricken East African nation working as private security guards in Iraq. Hired out to multibillion-dollar companies for hundreds of dollars a month, they risk their lives seeking fortunes protecting US Army bases, airports, and oil firms.
The war in Iraq is the most privatized conflict in history. Since the invasion in 2003, the US Department of Defense has doled out contracts worth an estimated $100 billion to private firms. Covering a vast range of services from catering to dry cleaning to security, one in every five dollars the US spends in Iraq ends up in the pockets of the contractors, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office. Increasingly these jobs have been outsourced to developing countries.
It is clear why the US contractors came to Uganda. As an impoverished former British colony, the country is awash with unemployed and English-speaking potential recruits. Its pliant government was an early member of President Bush’s “coalition of the willing,” and with a lingering 20-year insurgency, it also has a glut of experienced army veterans, who made up the initial contingent of Ugandans in Iraq.
More important, hiring Ugandans is cheap. Since the first Ugandans were sent to Iraq in late 2005, competition from other developing countries in Africa and the Indian subcontinent has seen the government cut the minimum wage from $1,300 to $600 a month. That compares with the $15,000 that one industry insider estimated an American guard could make each month. Nevertheless, competition is fierce, and for those Ugandans who land a job, Iraq can prove a bonanza.
Paul Mugabe is back in Uganda for a month. For the past year, the sinewy, nervous young man has been guarding the American Camp Diamondback at the airport in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul, and soon he will be heading to Baghdad.
“It’s not like Uganda. You sweat and sweat and sweat,” says Mr. Mugabe, a former soldier in the Ugandan Army. “It is the most dangerous place in the world. It’s even worse than Congo.”
With the money he’s earned during those 12 months, back in his village Mugabe has built himself two houses, bought a bar, and increased the herd of cows his father left him to 30.
“You should see the size of my banana plantation,” he smiles. When he returns from another year in Iraq, he should have saved enough money to cover a wedding and the traditional bride price needed to find a pretty wife, he says.
But despite his nascent business empire and hopes of love, the fact that he is putting his life on the line to help US companies make massive profits is not lost on him. “If I am earning $600 a month and these companies are making billions, it is not fair,” he says.
For Uganda, however, another country’s war on a continent far away has proved to be lucrative. “The Iraq opportunity brings in about $90 million dollars, whereas our chief export, which is coffee, brings in around $60 or $70 million a year,” says the former state minister for labor, employment, and industrial relations, Mwesigwa Rukutana, now minister of higher education. That figure is mostly made up of remittances.
But domestic criticism has been fierce, with some equating the system to human trafficking or slavery. Reports of abuse, ranging from poor conditions and changeable contracts to sexual assault, have appeared in the media.
“Unlike in the past when there was the slave trade, no company comes here and recruits anyone against their wishes. It is willing worker, willing employer,” Mr. Rukutana says. “If anyone thinks the conditions there are bad or that he is going to be exploited, no one is compelling him to go.” Rukutana says that only one Ugandan has been killed in Iraq, while others say more have died.
If anyone understands some of the hardships of working in Iraq and the industry it’s spawned, then it is Moses Matsiko. Mr. Matsiko has spent nearly four years working for a US firm in Afghanistan and Iraq. In late 2006, a convoy he was escorting through the town of Fallujah was ambushed. He was shot seven times but survived. Two American colleagues he was with were killed.
But far from shy away from the dangers of Iraq, Matsiko has embraced its opportunities. In 2007, he started his own company to train and send guards to Iraq and now has over 1,200 in the country.
“My experience in Iraq is that despite having been shot seven times, it is very great,” he says. President Obama’s withdrawal plans have cast a shadow of doubt over his future business plans. But that has just forced Matsiko to start looking opportunities elsewhere.
“If all goes well, then I hope to be sending people to Afghanistan in the near future,” he smiles.
Story here.