MOGADISHU, Somalia —

Richard Rouget, a gun for hire over two decades of bloody African conflict, is the unlikely face of the U.S. campaign against militants in Somalia.

Rouget, 51, a former French Army officer, commanded a group of foreign fighters during Ivory Coast's civil war in 2003, was convicted by a South African court of selling his military services and did a stint in the presidential guard of the Comoro Islands, an archipelago plagued by political tumult and coup attempts.

Now he works for Bancroft Global Development, a private U.S. security company the State Department has indirectly financed to train African Union (AU) troops who have fought in Mogadishu against al-Shabab, the Somali militant group allied with al-Qaida.

Employees of Bancroft, based in Washington, D.C., have been working to help train AU troops, who also are struggling to get control of the shattered capital, Mogadishu, as it fills up with refugees fleeing famine in southern Somalia.

The men employed by Bancroft live in small trailers near Mogadishu's airport but often go into the field. In addition to Rouget, the advisers include a retired general from the British marines, and a Danish political scientist.

Bancroft, which also is funded by the United Nations, has provided training in a range of military services, from bomb disposal and sniper training to handing out police uniforms.

The company plays a vital part in the conflict raging inside Somalia, a country that has been effectively ungoverned and mired in chaos for years. The fight against al-Shabab, a group U.S. officials fear could someday carry out strikes against the West, has mostly been outsourced to African soldiers and private companies out of reluctance to send U.S. troops back into a country they hastily exited nearly two decades ago.

"We do not want an American footprint or boot on the ground," said Johnnie Carson, the Obama administration's top State Department official for Africa.

A visible U.S. military presence would be provocative, he said, partly because of Somalia's history as a graveyard for U.S. missions, including the "Black Hawk Down" episode in 1993, when Somali militiamen killed 18 U.S. service members.

Still, in the past year, the United States has quietly stepped up operations inside Somalia, U.S. officials acknowledge. The CIA, which largely finances the country's spy agency, has covertly trained Somali intelligence operatives, helped build a large base at Mogadishu's airport and carried out joint interrogations of suspected terrorists with their counterparts in a ramshackle Somali prison.

The Pentagon has turned to strikes by armed drone aircraft to kill al-Shabab militants and recently approved $45 million in arms shipments to African troops fighting in Somalia.

Having an effect

Al-Shabab has shown its ability to strike beyond Somalia, killing dozens of Ugandans last summer in a suicide attack that many believe was a reprisal for the Ugandan government's decision to send troops to Somalia. Now, though, thanks in part to Bancroft, the private security company, the militants have been forced into retreat.

Several U.N. and AU officials credit the work of Bancroft with improving the fighting skills of the African troops in Somalia, who this past weekend forced al-Shabab militants to withdraw from Mogadishu for the first time in years.

Like other security companies in Somalia, Bancroft has thrived as a proxy for the U.S. government. Based in a mansion along Embassy Row in Washington, Bancroft is a nonprofit enterprise run by Michael Stock, 34, a Virginia native who founded the company not long after graduating from Princeton in 1999. He used some of his family's banking fortune to set up Bancroft as a small land-mine-clearing operation.

Stock said his men share information with the FBI about bomb materials and the DNA of suicide bombers, who sometimes turned out to be Somali-American young people from the Midwest. Stock said his company receives no compensation for sharing information with the FBI.

He strongly objects if "mercenary" is used to describe his men. Instead he describes Bancroft as a nongovernmental organization dedicated to finding permanent solutions to violent conflict. His men say they are trying to stabilize a country ravaged by 20 years of civil war and a famine estimated to have killed 29,000 children in the past three months.

In recent years, the company has expanded its mission in Somalia and runs one of the only fortified camps in Mogadishu.

The Bancroft camp operates as a Spartan hotel for visiting aid workers, diplomats and journalists. But the company's real income has come from the U.S. government, albeit circuitously. The governments of Uganda and Burundi pay Bancroft millions of dollars to train their soldiers for counterinsurgency missions in Somalia under an African Union banner, money that the State Department then reimburses to the two African nations. Since 2010, Bancroft has collected about $7 million through this arrangement.

U.S. and U.N. officials said that Bancroft's team in Mogadishu — a mixture of about 40 former South African, French and Scandinavian soldiers who call themselves "mentors" — has steadily improved the skills of the African troops.

The advisers typically work from the front lines, showing troops how to build sniper pits or smash holes in walls to move between houses.

"Urban fighting is a war of attrition, you nibble, nibble, nibble," said Rouget, the Bancroft contractor.

Worries over proxies

Some critics view the role played by Rouget and other contractors as a troubling trend: relying on private companies to fight the battles that nations have no stomach for.

Some U.S. congressional officials investigating the money being spent for operations in Somalia said opaque arrangements like those for Bancroft made it difficult to properly track how the funds were spent.

It also makes it harder for U.S. officials to monitor who is being hired for the Somalia mission. In Bancroft's case, some trainers are veterans of Africa's bush wars who sometimes use aliases in the countries where they fought. Rouget, for example, used the name Col. Sanders.

He denies he is a mercenary and said his conviction in a South African court was more a "regulatory infraction" than a crime.

In Washington, U.S. officials said debates were under way about just how much the United States should rely on clandestine militia training and armed drone strikes to fight al-Shabab.

Over the past year, the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, according to one U.S. official, has become a hive of military and intelligence operatives "chomping at the bit" to escalate operations in Somalia. But Carson, the State Department official, has opposed the drone strikes.

In a telephone interview, he played down any disagreements and rejected criticism of America's approach toward Somalia. It is a country with historically difficult problems, he said, and the American support to the African peacekeepers has helped beat back al-Shabab's forces.

As for the rest of southern Somalia, still in al-Shabab's hands? "One step at a time, he said. "One step at a time."

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.