US Navy strikes in Somalia

Today’s news about US missile strikes against a suspected terrorist hideout in Somalia is short on details but rich in quality of imagination. Take this quote from the article, for example:

“When we came out we found our neighbor’s house completely obliterated as if no house existed here,” Fatuma Abdullahi told The Associated Press. “We are taking shelter under trees. Three planes were flying over our heads.”

This report comes, of course, on the heels of the usual claims of the obligatory child victims:

Residents and police in Dobley said at least eight people, including four children, were seriously injured when a home was destroyed.

At this point none of us knows one way or another about these alleged child casualties, but I do know that the house—described as belonging to a neighbor, implying innocent and familiar locals but reported by US authorities to be frequented by known terrorists— wasn’t flattened by those planes supposedly seen flying overhead. The bit about taking refuge under trees from warplanes is rich indeed, but richer still is the irony that in fact the safe house was hit by Tomahawk cruise missiles fired, not from the sky above, but from beneath the sea by an American submarine just offshore.

Were innocent civilians, even children, killed or seriously injured in the attack? Were American planes passing over the area just after the strike?

I don’t know.

But my guess is that Somali children are just fine, as fine as they can be in one of the worst hellholes on planet Earth—a notorious safe haven for jihadists in the home of the infamous and humiliating Black Hawk Down incident—where prolonged famine, continual fighting between Somali warlords and Ethiopian troops, and ferocious internecine battles among the warlords themselves to boot, are the only realities Somali youth have ever known.

A house disappearing here or there would seem to be the least of their problems.