The blocking by the US [7] of UN funding to African Union (AU) forces in Somalia from next year is a body blow to a mission that has long been on financial life-support. The UN Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS) provides the logistical backing critical to the functioning of the AU mission. Without that underpinning, it’s hard to see how the AU's 11,800-strong force can continue. That became evident when Washington vetoed the application to Somalia of UN Resolution 2719 [8] on peacekeeping cost-sharing. The AU's near two-decade intervention has done significant work. Despite heavy casualties, it succeeded in ousting al-Shabab from Mogadishu—a mission the UN and the rest of the international system was unwilling to take on – and continued to protect Somalia’s fractious political elite from the jihadist insurgency. But the inability [9] of Somalia to grow and deploy its own security forces to consolidate territorial gains secured by the AU resulted in deadly mission creep [10] and effectively tore up any putative exit plan. Instead, the AU has soldiered on in the absence of a workable political strategy [11], and with ever-shrinking sources of financing.
From The New Humanitarian [13], July 10
