Italy to Move Troops Out of Somali Capital

Formalizing the first major crack in the U.N. military coalition struggling to pacify and rebuild Somalia, the commander of Italy’s troops announced Friday that his soldiers will withdraw from the embattled Somali capital to demonstrate Rome’s sharp disagreement with what it considers strong-arm tactics against supporters of Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid.

Gen. Bruno Loi’s statement that his troops would redeploy in the Somali countryside on Sept. 5 was greeted with some relief by many of the senior U.S. officers in the U.N.’s central command here. They consider it the removal of an obstacle to their tough campaign to round up weapons arsenals in the capital and track down the renegade Aidid and his top lieutenants, whom they blame for the massacre of 24 Pakistani peacekeepers in Mogadishu in June.

But officials conceded that the withdrawal of about 800 Italians from the northern sector of Mogadishu, one of the few oases of peace in the increasingly dangerous city, will leave a critical gap in the U.N. military presence here. The United Nations is attempting to regain control of the streets amid escalating ambushes and drive-by shootings apparently conducted by Aidid’s forces.

Loi described the move by the Italians, who have 2,400 troops in Somalia, as “the only way we can show we don’t agree with the policies of the United Nations.” He indicated that the U.N. central command in Somalia, dominated by the United States, is dangerously close to using tactics similar to those of the Somali terrorists that it is trying to apprehend. Terrorist attacks, he said, have increased “in quantity and efficiency” in the aftermath of U.S. air strikes on key Aidid strongholds in June and July.

“We cannot use the same means,” Loi said, echoing sharp criticism of the U.N.-authorized strikes from Italian officials last month in Rome. The Italians threatened at one point to withdraw entirely from the coalition in Somalia.

“It started as a humanitarian mission, and it must remain a humanitarian mission,” Loi said.

The U.N. military spokesman in Somalia conceded that the redeployment, the result of a compromise reached after intensive negotiations among Italian, U.S. and U.N. diplomats in Rome, Washington and New York, would have more than a symbolic impact.

“It will create a void that will have to be filled,” U.S. Army Maj. David Stockwell told reporters Friday afternoon. But he added, “The system here was created to be flexible. No one contingent is indispensable.”

U.N. officials suggested that the Italian position could be filled by some of the 2,600 Bangladeshi and Malaysian forces that recently arrived in Somalia, and eventually by a long-delayed contingent of 5,000 Indian soldiers the United Nations now hopes will arrive in September.

Speaking privately, several American officers assigned to the U.N. command asserted that several national contingents, among them the Americans and Pakistanis, strongly suspected that the Italians, Somalia’s former colonial rulers, were partial to Aidid and his clansmen, who still predominate in the most violent district of south Mogadishu.

Other nations represented in Somalia, however, sided with Italy. Rome called for negotiations with Aidid, instead of military operations against him, in the aftermath of last month’s air strike on a Mogadishu villa that the United Nations identified as Aidid’s command center. The assault by U.S. helicopter gunships killed many of Aidid’s top lieutenants and a number of Somali civilians. A Somali mob became so enraged that it brutally beat to death four Western journalists who arrived on the scene to document the damage.

Among the critics of that attack was Germany, which has joined the U.N. coalition in its first deployment outside North Atlantic Treaty Organization borders since World War II. Several Arab and African nations in the coalition also expressed concern after the air strike.

The head of all civilian and military U.N. operations in Somalia, retired U.S. Adm. Jonathan Howe, refused to comment directly on the Italian withdrawal in an interview Friday, saying only that the conflict was “being worked out in a way we all feel comfortable with.”

But Howe made it clear that the Italian announcement came just when his 24,500-member force was beefing up its patrols and weapons searches in the capital.

With the aid of 60 new armored personnel carriers that have landed in Mogadishu by ship and air during the past several days, Howe said, the multinational force is committed to breaking the siege that has kept the United Nations hunkered down in its sprawling former U.S. Embassy compound for weeks.

He said that his staff has been meeting with elders of Aidid’s Habr Gadir clan in an effort to reach a political solution that will bring peace to the city. But he stressed, “The military solution is to arrest Aidid and disarm the city.”