By Afyare Abdi Elmi – THE UNITED Nations’ Office for Coordinating Humanitarian Affairs in Somalia reported that the recent clashes between Ethiopian troops and Somali resistance groups killed more than 1,000 civilians and displaced more than 350,000 residents of Mogadishu.

The European Union has reacted to this carnage and it is investigating whether war crimes were committed by the Ethiopian forces and Somali government militias. The EU argues that forces intentionally targeted civilian areas.

The United States, however, is on a different page. When the Union of Islamic Courts defeated the US-backed warlords, the Bush administration — using the war on terrorism as justiciation — supported the Ethiopian occupation, arguing that the Islamists were an emerging threat to the US interests.

But approaching the complex and multilayered Somali conflict in this simplistic way and linking it to the war on terror was a mistake.

The United States inadvertently stepped into a local, tribal, and regional political quagmire.

The resistance groups — clans, business groups, and Islamists — are challenging the occupying Ethiopian troops and the warlord-government in a variety of ways.

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