Underreported, Part II: Concerns about Terrorism Delay US Aid to Somalia

More than 2.5 million Somalis are now in desperate need of food, but it wasn’t until late Wednesday that the State Department announced that it would send food aid to the country. The reason? Concerns that sending food aid would be aiding al-Shabab, which controls parts of southern Somalia and which the United States views as a terrorist organization. On today’s Underreported, Eliza Griswold, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Tenth Parallel, describes why the State Department was concerned that al-Shabab would use the food as a weapon and the challenges of providing food aid to areas where aid workers were banned until quite recently.