Thursday, September 22, 2011
The Pentagon has also begun flying armed drones from a base in the Seychelles, the the newspaper added.
These Seychelles-based MQ-9 Reaper drones, known as “hunter-killers,” can supplement strikes on targets inside Somalia already being carried out from the long-established US military base in Djibouti, the Wall Street Journal noted on Wednesday.
The US has previously launched lethal drone attacks in Somalia as well as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan and Yemen.
Construction of a drone base inside Ethiopia will expand the already-extensive military cooperation between Washington and Addis Ababa. US officials have said, according to the Post, that Ethiopia has emerged in recent years as “a valued counterterrorism partner because of threats posed by al-Shabaab.”
It is not clear why Ethiopia rather than Kenya has become the prime US ally in East Africa in the Obama administration's escalating campaign against suspected al-Qa'ida-linked elements in the sub-region.
The Post quotes an unnamed former US military official familiar with special operations in East Africa as saying, “We have a lot of interesting cooperation and arrangements with the Ethiopians when it comes to intelligence collection and linguistic capabilities.”
The source added that the US relies on Ethiopian linguists to translate signals intercepted by US intelligence agencies that monitor mobile phone calls and e-mail messages into and out of Somalia.
“The CIA and other agencies also employ Ethiopian informants who gather information from across the border,” the Post reported.
The United States and Ethiopia have been discussing construction of a drone base inside Ethiopia for the past four years, the Post said. The plan had been delayed, however, because “the Ethiopians were not all that jazzed [excited about it],” the Post quotes an unnamed US official as saying
Source: Daily Nation