Published 28 May 09
Strategic Interests
by J. Peter Pham, Ph.D.
World Defense Review columnist
Somalia's Persistent Violence Threatens Regional Security, U.S. Interests
In recent months while attention has been riveted on the predations on merchant shipping by increasingly emboldened Somali pirates (see my most recent analysis on Somali piracy, published April 30), the cycle of conflict and violence onshore in Somalia which gives the maritime marauders the opportunity needed to carry out their attacks has continued and, indeed, has intensified in recent weeks. In fact, there is widespread fear that the country's barely notional "Transitional Federal Government" (TFG) will collapse altogether in the face of an offensive launched three weeks ago by Islamist militants spearheaded by al-Shabaab ("the youth"), an al-Qaeda-linked group that was formally designated a "foreign terrorist organization" by the U.S. Department of State last year, and the Hisbul al-Islamiyya ("Islamic party") group of Sheikh Hassan Dahir 'Aweys, a figure who appears personally on both United States and United Nations antiterrorism sanctions lists and who headed the shura of the Islamic Courts Union before it was driven out of Mogadishu by Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) two years ago. The result is concern that the failed state may fall altogether under the militants, thus presenting an even greater threat to regional security as well as U.S. interests in the global fight against jihadist extremism in general and its al-Qaeda-linked manifestation in particular.
The problem begins in the unrealistic expectation of some members of the international community that, notwithstanding the farcical nature of the "election" in Djibouti described in this column space earlier this year which purported gave TFG President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed his "mandate," things would work out and that, as Dr. Ken Menkhaus of Davidson College continued to try to argue in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa last week, "Somali communities, clans, and factions would rally in support of the TFG." As I had the occasion to observe two months ago:
First, despite all the wishful thinking with which the international community has invested in Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, he has nothing to show for his first two months in office. [Six weeks ago] I noted that "while it is entirely possible that Sharif Ahmed's accession to the titular headship of the Somali state could herald an unexpected turnaround, it is probably more likely that the contrived nature of his 'election' and the overall dynamics of the ongoing devolution of Somalia are such that it is but prelude to the wholesale unraveling of the transitional framework, opening the way for the conflict in the Horn of Africa to ratchet up to an entirely new level." In fact, while Sharif Ahmed has made all sorts of promises of both money and concessions – including the imposition of Islamic law – he has yet to make much headway in building a broad-based coalition. In fact, the potential elements of the coalition, including members of the cabinet appointed under Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke (a Canadian national who has lived abroad for nearly four decades and whose family is located in northern Virginia), are held together by little more than the expectation that they will be handsomely paid for their support the TFG ... The transitional parliament is even more dysfunctional: the fact that its writ barely covers several blocks in Mogadishu did not prevent its members from expanding its existing fourteen committees into twenty-seven panels in a vote Tuesday [March 26] attended by barely a quorum of a simple majority the bloated 550-seat assembly.
Second, the reality of the situation is that by even the most flexible reading of the Transitional Federal Charter that forms the basis for the TFG has the interim government's mandate expiring within six months. Reports are already coming in that many factions are merely waiting for the time to run out and, surmising that the United Nations will be hesitant to create a blue-helmeted peacekeeping force to replace the under-resourced 3,500-strong African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) – which was recently beefed up by the deployment of a third battalion from the Ugandan People's Defense Force – are stockpiling weapons and recruiting fighters for the anticipated free-for-all for control of central and southern Somalia once the TFG loses even its notional claim to authority. In fact, the TFG's own limited troops seem to have drawn the same conclusion and acted accordingly.
Events in recent weeks have confirmed my analysis about the fundamental weakness of the TFG, the fifteenth attempt at establishing a national government since the collapse of the Somali Democratic Republic in early 1991. The Hawiye, the predominant clan-family in the capital of Mogadishu can hardly be said to have rallied to the TFG: the Abgaal sub-clans have effectively ostracized Sheikh Sharif, despite his being one of their own, while the Habar Gidir sub-clans are split. And, thanks to Sheikh Sharif's frequent peregrinations abroad, more Somalis than ever view the internationally-recognized interim authorities as little better than foreign puppets – and ineffectual ones at that. All of the TFG's "outreach" to date has amounted to pulling in an occasional warlord or two with bribes paid from funds it has received from Western or Arab countries. These characters have little interest in either governance nor even security and stay "loyal" only so far as the money is forthcoming. Furthermore, while literally thousands from the TFG president's Abgaal sub-clan turned out last month to sign up in response to an internationally recruitment drive, more than 90 percent of those who enlisted have since disappeared with their sign-up bonuses and, more ominously, their weapons. Thus such forces as the TFG nominally has managed to field in the current fight would be more accurately described as those of warlords whose interests, at least for the moment, happen to align with the regime's.
In contrast, the various al-Shabaab factions and their allies have proven themselves more resilient than many international observers have been willing to admit. Having in recent months consolidated their control of the area from the southern suburbs of the capital to the border with Kenya, the Islamist militants launched an offensive at the beginning of the month with the apparent objective of circling the capital to its north as well. On May 12, al-Shabaab forces took control of Buulobarde, a key town in the Hiraan region of central Somalia that sits athwart a strategic crossroad on the principal route from Mogadishu to Ethiopia. On May 17, they seized control of Jowhar, located 90 kilometers north of Mogadishu, and its population of 50,000; the town is the capital of the Middle Shabelle region and had served as a joint administrative capital for the TFG. To add insult to injury, Jowhar is Sheikh Sharif's hometown. The following day, May 18, insurgents from Hisbul al-Islamiyya struck 20 kilometers further north, capturing another strategic town, Mahaday. Two days later, on May 20, just as it has done previously in Lower Shabelle, Jubba, and other areas it controlled, al-Shabaab proclaimed the establishment of a new Islamist administration for Middle Shabelle, appointing one Sheikh Abdirahman Hassan Hussein as the governor. The same day, the TFG-aligned mayor of Beledweyne, capital of Hiraan, Sheikh Aden Omar, a.k.a. Jilibay, hastily resigned, evidently frightened that his town would be the next one targeted by the insurgents.
By the end of last week, the fighting had spread to Mogadishu, although al-Shabaab's use of Digil and Mirifle sub-clansmen as fighters in their recent victories had the unintended effect of rousing some of the Abgaal sub-clans into mobilizing in defense of the TFG, albeit not so much for the regime's sake as to keep the long-despised Rahanweyn out of historically Hawiye areas. The violence has consequently escalated, with dozens killed over the weekend, including six policemen and one civilian who died when a suicide bomber drove his truck into the gatehouse at a TFG base on Sunday. The insurgents followed up that attack two days later by firing mortar shells at the presidential palace, Villa Somalia, leaving nine people dead and ten others wounded. As of the middle of this week, al-Shabaab fighters had reportedly penetrated Mogadishu's Medina district, once thought to be one of the most secure in the city. In total, over 200 people have been killed while more than 60,000 others – many of them women and children – have been forced to flee the capital in just the last two weeks, joining the more than one million Somalis already displaced.
Last weekend's use of the suicide bomber as well as the planting of more sophisticated improvised explosive devices (IEDs), both reminiscent of tactics employed by insurgents in Iraq, point to a shifting dynamic in the Somali conflict that is only now being acknowledged by United Nations and backers of the TFG: the increasing numbers of foreign fighters who are tipping the balance in favor of al-Shabaab. While some estimate the number of foreign jihadists at 500, other observers on the ground put the number closer to 1,500, including militants from as far away as Nigeria and Pakistan as well as several hundred Somalis from the diaspora. As Agence France-Presse reported earlier this week, Sharif Ahmed is now publicly lamenting that "Somalia is being invaded by foreign fighters, whose main purpose is to turn the country into an Afghanistan or an Iraq."
While the comparison with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s may be a bit of a stretch, nonetheless it has to be admitted that al-Shabaab has succeeded in carving out a geographical space where it and likeminded jihadist groups can operate freely. For example, as I reported last month, the suicide bomber who killed four South Korean tourists and their local guide near the ancient fortress city of Shibam in Yemen's Hadramut (coincidentally, Usama bin Laden's ancestral home region) on March 15, Abdel Rahman Mehdi al-Aajbari, underwent training at a camp in Shabaab-controlled southern Somalia before returning to his native country to carry out the deadly attack. The same is believed to be the case with the suicide bomber who, three days later, hit a convoy carrying the South Korean ambassador and investigators sent to look into the earlier attack (fortunately, this time the terrorist, a 20-year-old student, only killed himself). Thus, even without toppling the TFG, al-Shabaab has already achieved a major objective of jihadists by securing a territorial base from which they can carry out attacks elsewhere, especially against targets on the Arabian Peninsula.
In addition to their effect on broader U.S.-led campaign against terrorism, the recent gains by al-Shabaab and its allies also have implications for security in the Horn of Africa subregion. There are reports, denied by the Ethiopian government, that the ENDF has reentered Somalia, after having withdrawn in mid-December 2008, setting up positions near Beledweyne as well as Ceelbuur in the Galgaduud region. While a new intervention to prevent the further advance of an Islamist movement with irredentist agenda would be an understandable action on the part of Addis Ababa, it certainly would not be helpful to the overall situation within Somalia. Kenya, too, cannot escape being embroiled in its Somali neighbor's troubles. As I noted here last month, preexisting tensions between the country's Muslim minority, especially the ethnic Somali community, and the rest of the Kenyan population are bad enough without the seemingly endless parade of Somali pirates, captured by U.S., European, and other naval forces, who are being hailed before courts in Mombasa. Last Sunday, Nairobi's The Nation newspaper reported on the concerns of Kenyan parents and security officials that al-Shabaab is recruiting youth from local madrassas to fight in Somalia.
Among the states in the subregion, there is little doubt that the success that al-Shabaab and other insurgent groups would not be possible without the support they have received from Eritrea. Nearly two years ago, I warned in this column space about the danger posed by "the rogue regime in Asmara which, for its own reasons, is fomenting a growing cycle of violence phenomenon that not only threatens the stability of its neighbors, but, because of its support of an al-Qaeda-linked Islamist insurgency, risks opening a broad terrorist front across the entire Horn of Africa." Last Wednesday, after an emergency summit in Addis Ababa, the Council of Ministers of the subregional Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) issued a statement asserting that "the government of Eritrea and its financiers continue to instigate, finance, recruit, train, fund and supply the criminal elements in and/or to Somalia" and calling on the UN Security Council to "impose sanctions on the government of Eritrea without any further delay." Two days later, the Peace and Security Council of the African Union concurred, issuing a communiqué expressing its "deep concern at the reports regarding the support provided to these armed groups [in Somalia], through training, provision of weapons and ammunitions and funding, by external actors, including Eritrea, in flagrant violation of the United Nations arms embargo" and likewise asking the Security Council to "impose sanctions against all those foreign actors, both within and outside the region, specially Eritrea, providing support to the armed groups engaged in destabilization activities in Somalia, attacks against the TFG, the civilian population and AMISOM, as well as against all the Somali individuals and entities working towards undermining the peace and reconciliation efforts and regional stability." (While the Security Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to extend AMISOM's mandate through January 2010 and to move towards assuring the force more stable funding from UN assessments, it did not act on the sanctions request.)
One hopeful indicator amidst of this otherwise gloomy landscape has been the fact that the ideological motivations of al-Shabaab and other extremist movements do not permit them to proceed at a slower speed in their march through Somali territory and society. Instead, a certain internal dynamic compels them to keep pushing, even when it might be in their long-term interests to act with greater circumspection. Militarily, this temptation to overreach is visible in the relentless advance of the jihadists whose cause one might argue would be better served by consolidating their rule in areas they already control while letting the TFG collapse of its own internal contradictions. Politically, the militants' campaign of wa'yigelin ("consciousness-raising") – by which al-Shabaab means the imposition of its interpretation of Islam on other Somalis – has won for them few fans among the clans. Recent examples of Shabaab "awareness efforts" range from the noisome (e.g., the restriction of the chewing of qat, the narcotic leaf beloved by Somalis, Yemenis, and other peoples of the subregion, to the outskirts of Baidoa) to the discriminatory (e.g., the ban on men and women traveling together in the same public transport conveyances announced this week by al-Shabaab's commander in Kismayo, Ahmed Hassan Ali) to the downright brutal (e.g., the imposition of hudud punishments like public stoning for alleged adulteresses and public amputation for accused thieves in Kismayo such as the one reported by the BBC last week which included the dangling of the bloody hand "by its index finger in front of the crowd to prove that the punishment had been meted out").
Not only do the jihadists aspire to control the conduct of the living, but they also impose themselves on the dead, systematically desecrating the tombs of saints and other religious figures venerated by the Sufi turuq ("brotherhoods"), which have traditionally been highly influential among the Somali. As the foremost contemporary authority on the Somali, Professor I.M. Lewis of the London School of Economics, has noted, Sufism has historically been more than a religious preference among the Somali: "Sufism is particularly well-adapted to Somali social organization since it enables Somalis (and they are active agents here) to sacralize their society at all levels of segmentation by indiscriminately canonizing their lineage ancestors as 'saints,' whatever the latters' actual religious comportment may have been." Thus, it is not surprising that incidents like the destruction last week of the graves of three such saintly ancestors in Baardheere, in the Gedo region – an act of iconoclastic vandalism described by the local al-Shabaab district governor, one Sheikh Abdulqadir Yusuf Qalbi, as "a religious act" – would incite the rise of loosely-organized Sufi militia, Ahlu Sunna wal-Jama'a (roughly, "[Followers of] the Traditions and Consensus [of the Prophet Muhammad]"), to oppose the decidedly alien Wahhābist ideology which al-Shabaab has appropriated from some of its foreign sponsors. Time alone will tell if the Sufi alliance will prove itself truly a force to be reckoned with.
In short, while most Somalis loathe the jihadists (especially the foreigners), dislike of the extremist agenda should not be confused with support for the TFG. In truth, the TFG's continuing existence on life support says more about the international community's stubborn refusal to admit the failure of its top-down approach and general lack of investment in any alternatives than it does about the interim regime's viability. In short, the TFG's chances of success are non-existent: the only effect outside support can have will be to stave off an inevitable collapse of a regime whose only legitimacy was that conferred on it by outsiders unable or unwilling to move past the repeated failure of their top-down approach to remedying the collapse of the unitary Somali state nearly two decades ago (one is at a total loss to find any empirical evidence for the "tremendous progress made to date "by the TFG" in restoring a semblance of normalcy and peace in Somalia" about which Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson regaled the U.S. Senate last week). The real question is whether the eventual failure of the latest "solution" will be followed by a total sweep by al-Shabaab and its allies or whether, as they have repeatedly shown themselves inclined to do, the extremists will prematurely overplay their hand and ultimately fail achieve control, opening the way for a conflict of a different sort between rival clans. In any of these scenarios, without a significant shift in policy to engage legitimate authorities and other effective local actors, short- to intermediate-term prospects both for stability in the Horn of Africa – and the surrounding waters – and for the advancement of U.S. security interests in the region beyond possibly containing Somali chaos do not appear especially promising.
— J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., as well as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.
Dr. Pham is the author of over two hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).
In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review Online's military blog, The Tank.
© 2009 J. Peter Pham
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