Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
In 2024, the Biden administration bragged that the “U.S. government is the single largest donor of humanitarian assistance to Somalia.”
A year earlier, the Biden administration had spent $1.1 billion on Somalia. And the same was true of the year before. U.S. spending on Somalia had shot up from $103 million under a Republican House to $300 million under Pelosi’s Democrats. By 2017, foreign aid to Somalia had passed the half a billion dollar mark, by 2018, it was over $800 million and by 2020, after Rep. Ilhan Omar joined Congress, our spending on Somalia had passed over $1 billion.
Over the last decade, $9.3 billion was spent on Somalia. Over $10 billion since 9/11. While the spending has dropped in the second Trump administration, another $150 million was allocated for 2025. Not only have we provided humanitarian aid for Somalia’s perennial famines, which like most UN declared famines remain dubious, but “Somalia (is) among the most significant recipients of security aid in sub-Saharan Africa” even though other countries are more troubled.
The skyrocketing spending on Somalia was intimately tied to the growing political power of Somalis who had migrated to America. The origins of America’s disastrous involvement in Somalia which would cost 42 American lives and countless billions of dollars began in Maine.
Sen. George Mitchell of Maine championed intervention to aid Somalis after the United Nations faked a famine, claiming that millions of Somalis were “on the brink of starving to death.” “The worst humanitarian disaster in the world today,” the former director of OFDA, the predecessor to USAID, claimed. There was no actual famine, millions were not starving and any food shortages were limited to a handful of rural areas, not the city of Mogadishu where our soldiers were sent.
The collapse of the regime of Mohammed Siad Barre, a murderous dictator, led to a civil war. Somali elites tied to Barre’s regime, including Rep. Omar’s father who was one of Barre’s colonels, fled to America, heading to Minnesota and Maine, among other places, built up political influence and urged politicians to intervene to ‘stabilize’ Somalia or millions would die.
Sen. Mitchell, who was of partial Lebanese Arab ancestry, championed the Somali intervention which cost the lives of “thirty American soldiers, four marines, and eight Air Force personnel”, resisted efforts to pull out the troops and continued to defend the mission afterward. He also defended the growing Somali population in Maine from efforts to restrict immigration.
The aid operation quickly turned into a campaign by Somali Darod exiles, the clan that Rep. Omar and much of the old Somali ruling class belonged to, against Mohamed Farrah Aidid, often described as a “warlord”, but who was no more of a warlord than any of the others, but who had been eliminating members of the Darod ruling class. And they wanted him gone.
A reluctant President George H.W. Bush finally gave in to political pressure and agreed to dispatch 26,000 American troops to save Somalis from ‘famine’. The intervention was originally supposed to cost $200 million, but soon ballooned to $885 million or over $2 billion today. Bush paid for it by cutting the construction of C-130 cargo planes and defense research grants.
The UN operation tethered American forces to UN Pakistani Muslim ‘peacekeepers’ whose government was backing Aidid’s rival warlord and chose to pick a fight with Aidid over a radio station, resulting in a firefight between the Pakistanis and a Somali faction. American intervention on behalf of the Pakistanis led to the Battle of Mogadishu, during which 18 American military personnel were killed, some of whose bodies were dragged through the streets, and 84 were wounded, for the worst single battle since Vietnam.
A number of Al Qaeda terrorists were on the ground in Somalia and the battles convinced Osama bin Laden that the United States of America was weak and vulnerable to a more serious blow, eventually leading to a series of attacks that climaxed in the hijackings of September 11.
The 4.5 million Somalis starving to death proved to be just as fictional as the UN’s subsequent fake famines in Gaza, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen, By 1996, the Somali population had increased by around 500,000 since the beginning of the civil war, and was up by nearly 20% by the end of the decade. These numbers were not consistent with famine, but a temporary population drop due to Somalis from certain clans fleeing to other countries to escape the fighting. The claims that 300,000 had died in Somalia from famine had little basis in reality and even humanitarian aid workers admitted that a malaria outbreak was behind most of the dying.
Dozens of American soldiers died for a lie pushed by Somali clan members in the U.S.
And despite that, even well after the Somali Civil War, American personnel, both military and ‘civilian’ contractors, continued to try and help Somalis with deadly results.
In 2017, Chief Petty Officer Kyle Milliken was killed in a firefight in Somalia while two other Americans were wounded. In 2020, three Americans were killed and two wounded in an attack on a base in Kenya used for peacekeeping operations in Somalia. And there is no end in sight.
The United States is being asked to help fund the ongoing African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia. The UN, well aware that Trump has a limited appetite for more foreign spending, has proposed a smaller $102.8 million budget, but costs on the ground have a way of increasing.
Our reason for being in Somalia is to help the Somali regime fight Al-Shabaab, the local version of Al Qaeda, but the fight between the regime and Al Qaeda is, like everything else in Somalia and much of the Muslim world, a war between clans and sub-clans, both of which support different factions of Islamic terrorists. Al-Shabaab is backed by Iran while the Somali regime is backed by Turkey and Qatar. It’s not a fight against terrorism, but a fight between terrorists.
Christians live in terror in Somalia, worshipping in underground churches and knowing that they may be killed at any moment. “Outwardly, all Somali Muslims must support attacks on Somali Christians because otherwise they may not be seen as Muslim,” a Somali Christian said.
American troops are however not there to protect them, but to protect the regime of Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre who had declared that “Hamas is not a terrorist outfit but rather a movement for the liberation of its territory and people” and that “the blood spilled in Gaza heralds the forthcoming liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
America’s involvement in Somalia has been a disaster in which we lost blood and treasure, and paved the way for the September 11 attacks, to help end a famine that never existed. Since then we’ve been dragged in to stabilize Somalia so that we aren’t threatened by Somali pirates, Somali terrorists and the Somali ‘refugees’ who flooded Minnesota, Maine and other states, and defrauded Americans on a scale that their counterparts in Somalia could never have done.
Somalia has been branded very corrupt because officials were caught embezzling $21 million. Somalis in Minnesota embezzled $250 million through welfare meal frauds alone, and billions more through everything from housing the homeless to autism, and there is no end in sight.
No wonder that Somalia’s Foreign Minister, its UN ambassador and the deputy speaker of its parliament have all allegedly run health care companies in Ohio and Minnesota.
America lavished billions on Somalia and then Somalis stole billions from Americans.
After 40 American lives lost and over $10 billion wasted, it’s time to get Somalia out of America, and to get America out of Somalia.
