Looting Spreads Across Unoccupied Somalia, One Step Ahead of Troops : Famine: Relief workers criticize the military’s methodical pace, saying it leaves people in unguarded countryside vulnerable to warring clans.

MOGADISHU, Somalia —  The methodical pace of U.S. intervention here has set off a counterproductive reaction of looting and killing in unoccupied areas that is spreading across the border into Kenya, relief officials said Saturday.

As U.S. Marines and other foreign troops in the U.N.-sponsored Joint Task Force take over more centers in the famine zone, Somalia’s warring clans are withdrawing westward toward the Kenyan border.

Their pattern is to loot villages and farms as they go, a tactic that has now spread into large camps that shelter nearly half a million Somalis just across the Kenyan frontier, according to Panos Moumtzis, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

“There have been 15 attacks by ‘technicals’ (gangsters manning gun-mounted pickup trucks) in the last few days involving shooting and looting,” Moumtzis said. “They have driven many of our relief workers away.”

This is characteristic of the developments since the Marines first landed in Mogadishu on Dec. 9. Rather than risk confronting U.S. troops, marauding clans withdraw into unprotected areas and attack their fellow Somalis, usually with growing intensity as the Marines get nearer.

The problem is aggravated by the U.S. tactic of going from one key area to another, one at a time. After more than two weeks, two of the eight major target cities and towns remain unoccupied as does most of the rural countryside.

The Marines argue that they are going as fast as they can under great difficulties. Marine Col. Fred Peck, the task force spokesman, says operations will grow in size and speed as more combat troops land. So far, only about 13,000 of the originally planned 28,000 U.S. troops are here.

These numbers mean that even in areas supposedly under task force control, security is a relative matter. On Friday, for example, a Marine convoy traveling from Bardera to Baidoa, two towns in the country’s interior previously occupied by U.S. and French troops, was attacked by men in a pickup truck.

The Marines returned fire, according to Col. Steve Ritter, a task force spokesman, hitting three men and driving the truck off the road. There were no U.S. casualties.

Moreover, even in Mogadishu, site of the largest concentration of foreign forces, gunfire is a regular occurrence as are attacks on journalists. It often seems that U.S. military facilities are a magnet for local gunmen; most of their assaults occur just outside such installations.

Besides insufficient numbers, Peck also pointed to exceedingly poor roads and the need to clear large mine fields as major obstacles to quick troop movements.

The agony of the starving Somalis waiting for the Marines and relief shipments is particularly acute near Gailalassi, the next city targeted for intervention.

“There has been terrible looting in Gailalassi,” said Farouk Mawlawi, a U.N. spokesman in Mogadishu. “There is no security. The situation is so bad that all relief agencies have been pulled out and won’t go back until the troops come.”

The Marines intend to enter the city today. If past patterns hold, the clans will pull back without opposition toward the last remaining target area, Belet Huen, where they will pillage the population until troops arrive there, probably on Monday.

“The United States says it will cover the border (with Kenya),” Moumtzis said in a brief interview, “but they won’t say when. I hope it will be soon--otherwise we face a disaster.”

But even if the Americans pacify most of the Somali countryside, they have no mandate to cross into Kenya.

There, about 500,000 Somali refugees live in 16 camps near the frontier. The camps are in desert country, with no protection from the roving Somali clans.

“The intervention (in Somalia) hasn’t eased the crisis,” Moumtzis said, “just spread it around.”

The Kenyan army “does what it can, but it can’t do much,” he said, because it is small and spread unusually thin because it must protect thousands of polling places for Kenyan national elections Tuesday.

As if raiding clans weren’t obstacle enough to making Somalia secure for relief distribution, the population of hungry people face yet another example of Somalis willing to destroy other Somalis for their own gains. Even in areas under Marine protection, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get the relief through because of a shortage of trucks.

So far, the United Nations has only 20 trucks available. Eighty more are in neighboring Ethiopia but have not been brought here because of opposition from Somali truck owners and drivers. They complain that not only are the trucks from Ethiopia, but they have Ethiopian drivers.

Such attitudes gall relief workers, who point out that after two years of not receiving spare parts, there isn’t a Somali truck in usable condition.

In addition, Somali truckers want two to three times what the United Nations says is the going rate of 15 cents a ton per half mile.

“They want their exorbitant pay even though we have offered to find Somali trucks suitable for repair and to pay for the spare parts,” a U.N. spokesman said.

As a result, the 20 available trucks can haul their capacity of 300 tons of food to only one location at a time, then must return to Mogadishu to reload. This takes as long as four days. So far, there have been only three such 300-ton shipments.

Another impediment is a shortage of port workers, particularly in the southern city of Kismayu, where relief officials hoped they could unload large shipments for movement into the hard-hit countryside.

Instead, the Kismayu relief effort is depending on air shipments to the interior, which means much smaller food loads even though 18 flights of relief supplies are reported coming into the country daily from the outside.

“People tend to focus on the Marines,” said an American relief worker, “and God bless them. But the real issue here is still starving people. And we still aren’t doing enough for them.”