350 Marines Lend a Hand to Help Somalia Rebuild

About 350 U.S. Marines have landed in northern Somalia to help local officials rebuild roads and a burned-out school and orphanage as part of continuing humanitarian relief and training efforts, Pentagon officials said Thursday.

The deployment, dubbed Operation Open Hand, is an extension of earlier relief efforts by the U.S. military to secure deliveries of food and supplies to starving people in war-ravaged Somalia.

The Marines are part of a 2,000-member amphibious strike force offshore in the Gulf of Aden. They landed Tuesday near the towns of Bosaso and Alula.

Defense Department officials said the operation is not connected with the violence that has broken out in nearby Mogadishu, and they denied speculation that the Marines are being used to hunt down and arrest fugitive warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid.

Rather, they said, the mission is an expansion of earlier humanitarian aid provided in the southern and central regions of Somalia, and they noted that the Marines will return today to the ships of the Wasp Amphibious Ready Group.

“I think what you see here is the beginning of an effort to expand that overall humanitarian effort,” said Navy Capt. Michael Doubleday, a Pentagon spokesman. “And you will see more of this in the future as additional forces are added by other nations who have signed up to participate.”

Doubleday said communication lapses in Somalia prevented the Pentagon from announcing the four-day operation sooner.

The Marines are rebuilding a recently burned administrative building at the Bosaso port, as well as refurbishing a school, an orphanage and conducting minor road repairs. In addition, medical and dental personnel are conducting health clinics for local residents.

Open Hand is also delivering about 12 metric tons of medical supplies and a hundred cases of water, and Marines are unloading building supplies.

The mission is the first U.S. military deployment in northern Somalia since December, when a U.N. intervention team led by American soldiers began protecting relief supplies bound for millions of starving Somalians.

Also Thursday, U.N. authorities announced that the bodies of four Somali staff members of the U.N. peacekeeping force’s newspaper, Maanta, had been found. That brought to six the number of deaths in an ambush Wednesday by gunmen loyal to Aidid.