Islamists Regaining Somalia

Islamist insurgency grows in Somalia

The Islamist-led resistance in Somalia is growing in scale and aggression, with insurgents openly taking on Ethiopian troops and African Union peacekeepers in the capital Mogadishu, in fighting that has killed dozens, possibly hundreds, in the past three weeks.
Early on Saturday two groups of rebels fired grenades at Ugandan peacekeepers and briefly entered their post before being repelled. The attack, which coincided with an internet call by a Somali Islamist extremist, Adan Hashi Ayro, for peacekeepers to be targeted, came after two weeks of fighting and reprisals between insurgents and the allied Ethiopian and government troops that caused a massive exodus from Mogadishu.


The UN estimates that 173,000 people have fled the city since October 27, adding to the 330,000 already displaced from the capital this year. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of civilians were killed, as both sides fired shells indiscriminately into residential neighbourhoods.
Ahmedou Ould-Abdullah, the UN secretary general's special representative for Somalia, said last week that the huge displacement, coupled with high child malnutrition rates and extreme difficulty in delivering aid, had made this Africa's worst humanitarian crisis.

Few people believe that the situation is about to get better. Several experts interviewed by the Guardian say that the insurgents are becoming more powerful. A military analyst and a western diplomat to Somalia, neither of whom wished to be named, warned that the angry mood and conditions that allowed an Islamist movement to defeat a gang of warlords and take power in Mogadishu last year were returning. "We are on a merry-go-round and it's back to 2006," said the analyst. "The insurgents are gaining not only in physical strength, but in moral strength too."

African Union commanders told diplomats last week that the insurgents were actively fighting in 70% of Mogadishu's neighbourhoods. There are also signs that the resistance has spread beyond the capital. Islamic courts are reported to have taken control of two towns in the far south, while Hassan Al-Turki, a radical Islamist on the US terror list, is understood to be expanding his influence up the coast from his base near the Kenyan border.

Analysts say that the situation reflects a chronic miscalculation by the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, who sent his troops into Somalia late last year, and by the US, which backed that decision. The goal was to rout the Somali Council of Islamic Courts (SCIC), which had brought a measure of calm to Mogadishu for the first time in more than a decade, but which was accused by Washington and Addis Ababa of close links to al-Qaida.

Ethiopian troops easily swept through the Islamist fighters and installed the weak and unpopular Somali government in Mogadishu. The calm did not last long. Remnants of the SCIC's military wing, the Shabaab, launched a low-scale insurgency, using hit-and-run tactics and remote-controlled bombs to target Ethiopian and government troops. Many ordinary Somalis also resented the presence of tens of thousands of troops from Ethiopia. Soon warlords, clan leaders and businessmen were aiding the resistance with money, arms and their own militias.

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Somali leader rushed to hospital

Somalia's interim President Abdullahi Yusuf has been taken to hospital in the Kenyan capital, the BBC has learnt.

His condition is said to be "serious" but there are no further details. He had a liver transplant in the 1990s.

He was named president in 2004 after protracted peace talks in Kenya but has not been able to end years of conflict.

Mr Yusuf's Ethiopia-backed government is battling Islamist insurgents and the UN says that more than one million people are homeless in Somalia.

He is to be flown to London for treatment and has cancelled a meeting on Wednesday with regional leaders.

The news comes as four ministers resigned from the cabinet named by Mr Yusuf's newly appointed Prime Minister Nur Hussein Hassan.

Mr Yusuf, 73, had been due to travel to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa for Wednesday's meeting between regional leaders and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

President Yusuf controversially enlisted the help of the Ethiopian army to oust the Union of Islamic Courts from the capital, Mogadishu in December 2006.

The past year has seen increasing levels of violence as the Islamists battle the Ethiopian-backed government, rendering Mogadishu too unsafe for the government which has been forced to operate out of Baidoa.
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Qingu it's best not to engage in topics when your not familiar with the issue you want to discuss about(unless you educate yourself about this conflict). That was quite a big blunder you just made when you called a grassroots movement ''foreign''. Revealing you know little about the situation and dynamics of Somalia


A Wealth of Kindness Among Somalia's Poorest

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 10, 2007; A01



MARKA, Somalia -- After she escaped the urban battleground of Mogadishu, walked 20 days in the blasting heat, slept in the sand, dreamed of explosions and watched her four children get sicker and skinnier, Asiya Ali arrived one recent evening at this unfamiliar seaside town.

There was no international relief effort to greet her, only the setting sun and a town full of people already strained by the worst crop failure in recent memory. And so, scared and tired, Ali said, she turned to the only resource she had left: her clan.

"I'm Bimal," she told anyone she found wandering the soft sand streets of Marka, a process that led her to Fatima Mohamed, a distant relative she had never met.

"She cooked tea for us, gave sugar for the children, gave us tomatoes and bread," Ali recalled. "She said, 'Welcome.' "

Nearly a year after Ethiopian troops invaded Somalia with U.S. support to oust an Islamic movement there, the Somali capital of Mogadishu remains locked in a brutal urban war that has driven an estimated 600,000 people -- more than half the city's population -- into the countryside.

U.N. officials say Somalia has descended into the continent's worst humanitarian crisis, a situation veering toward famine in some areas.

Yet in the narrow streets that wind through this town of whitewashed buildings, it is difficult to find even one encampment of displaced people or a family that has been turned away.

Instead, the tired and hungry arrivals -- about 15,000 of them this year -- have been quietly absorbed into the grass-roofed houses of local residents such as Mohamed, who estimates she has hosted 10 families over the past year. Most of them, she said, are related to her through clan -- Somalia's intricate network of families, some of which trace their ancestry to Adam.

"We have nothing at all," Mohamed said. "But we do what we can."

While other parts of Africa, notably Sudan's western region of Darfur, have comparable levels of child malnutrition, there are few places where the gap between need and response is so great. The shortfall has been attributed to Somalia's lack of security, its often uncooperative government and the current focus of so many aid groups on the crisis in Sudan.

More than 200,000 of the people who have fled Mogadishu are living along a single road leading out of the city, a 10-mile stretch thought to be the largest single gathering of displaced people in the world.

The rest have fanned out to points north, west and south, arriving by truck, by donkey and on foot in towns such as this one about 50 miles from Mogadishu.

Here in the lower Shabeelle River region, long known as the country's breadbasket, vast fields of maize, sorghum and beans are shriveling for lack of rain, and food prices are skyrocketing.

Even without the beleaguered newcomers arriving daily, the situation has been so tenuous that the United Nations dispatched two ships this month with food intended to shore up the local population.

Mohamed said she had exactly one loaf of bread and a few tomatoes for her own family when Ali arrived last month. She divvied it up.

She had a bit of room in her house, and Ali and her children are still sleeping there. She had an extra dress and a piece of pink cloth, which she gave to Ali. "Without her, the problem would have been very bad. We're grateful she has a good heart," said Ali, who was wearing the dress.

Others arriving here have found refuge with local Somali groups such as one run by Mana Abdurahman, who has taken in more than 200 orphaned children this year, as well as families from Somalia's more marginal clans.

"I don't care where they're from," said Abdurahman, the daughter of a prominent clan leader.

Abdurahman walked through the place she calls her "village," a swath of sand and huts and shady palms, greeting two recently arrived families and a young girl named Asha, who had been dropped off by her Mogadishu neighbors.

In a small gesture of mercy, Abdurahman has decided to wait a while before telling the little girl she is the only one left of her family of seven. The rest were killed in a bomb blast in Mogadishu.

"Where is Ibrahim?" Abdurahman asked her gently.

"He's at home!" Asha said brightly.

"Where's your father?" Abdurahman asked.

"He's at home!" Asha said.

"Where's your mother?" Abdurahman asked.

"She's at home!" the little girl said, and on it went, as Abdurahman hugged her.

In the absence of more robust international aid, Somalis are mostly relying on such kindnesses and on money from relatives abroad, as well as the clan structures that have so often been blamed for undermining attempts to form a viable central government.

"Clans can be manipulated and badly used by politicians," said Mohamed Uluso, a political leader of a powerful subclan. "But clan is part of the life and welfare of Somali society, especially because we don't have a government taking care right now."

In fact, aid groups have blamed the transitional government of Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf for thwarting the meager relief effort.

In a briefing to the Security Council last week, the United Nations' humanitarian chief, John Holmes, appealed to donor nations to send more humanitarian workers and aid to Somalia, but he also emphasized the need to address the underlying political causes of the crisis.

Checkpoints manned by government soldiers and freelance militias, for instance, are charging as much as $400 to let trucks carrying food and other aid pass. U.N. workers have been arrested by government soldiers in Mogadishu, where political assassinations are becoming commonplace.

And just last week, Somalia's security chief, quoting an order from Yusuf, abruptly shut all roads and ports south of Mogadishu, leaving 3,700 tons of food on ships anchored off the coast.

The order was lifted without explanation the next day, and a battalion of rowboats headed out to offload the sacks stamped with the U.S. flag.

The other day, a crowd of several dozen families arrived with wooden carts to haul away sacks of sorghum and split yellow peas stacked at an abandoned school that was serving as a food distribution point.

Among them was Hawa Robleh, 45, who said she was receiving food aid for the first time in her life. She has to feed not only her own eight children, but also a family of distant relatives from Mogadishu who have been with her for two months.

"Life is difficult for me, but it's more difficult for them, because they left their homes," Robleh said. "We've shared everything we had."

She added, though, that even with the food rations, her generosity may not be enough.

"Since they arrived," she said, referring to her guests, "the children have become thinner."

Source


Omar_Mukthar Brother this is not Ethiopia vs Somalia multiple groups in Ethiopia are suffering the same attrocities under this regime which is America's lapdog, what is happening today in the Horn of Africa is two dictators financed,sponsored and protected by the West doing their dirty work while the masses are suffering ad infinitum...

In 5/10 years time this same ''west'' will start to condemn these two myopic fools and classify them in the same category as other African dictators of the past..ironic isn't it?

The Rise and Fall of Mogadishu's Islamic Courts


Introduction
In early April 2007, Jendayi Frazer, the highest-ranking US official to visit the country in more than a decade, met the President of the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia. But the meeting took place in the provincial town of Baidoa, not the capital Mogadishu that had been plunged into the worst violence since the days of the Somali 'civil war' in the early 1990s. The recent violence is the result of a seismic shift in southern Somali politics over the last twelve months, where the spectre of an Islamist movement - opening a new front on the 'war on terror' - has provoked the first significant international engagement in Somalia since the departure of the United Nations in 1995.

In an uncomfortably familiar pattern, genuine multilateral concern to support the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Somalia has been hijacked by unilateral actions of other international actors - especially Ethiopia and the United States - following their own foreign policy agendas. The recent deployment of African Union peacekeepers to Somalia came after the Ethiopian army, with apparent US backing, installed the Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu in early 2007. The justification for this unprecedented and highly provocative intervention was to stem the growth of an alternative Islamist regime that had taken root in Mogadishu in 2006, with suspected links to US-designated terrorist organizations.

During 2006 a variety of Islamist organizations, centred on a long-standing network of local Islamic or sharia courts in Mogadishu, had come together under an umbrella organization, popularly known in the Western media as the Islamic Courts Union. As the movement coalesced and seized control of Mogadishu, the Islamic Courts Union became an alternative to the internationally recognized, but internally disputed, Transitional Federal Government, then restricted to Baidoa. To the outside world, where the shift in the politics of Somalia had gone largely unnoticed, the Courts' sudden ascendance looked like a carefully planned Islamic revolution. The reality was far more complex.

The Origins of the Islamic Courts

The phenomenon of Islamic Courts in 'stateless' Somalia first appeared in north Mogadishu in August 1994. After nearly four years of persistent anarchy and political failures, Islamic clerics from a locally powerful clan with the blessing of their 'secular' political leaders, founded the first fully functioning sharia court.

The establishment of the Islamic Courts was not so much an Islamist imperative as a response to the need for some means of upholding law and order. The Islamist agenda in the Courts was not particularly 'programmatic'; they were not presided over by expert Islamic judges, nor were they adherents to any specific school of Islamic law. The enforcement of the Courts' judgments depended on militias recruited from the local clan. At root, the Islamic Courts were part and parcel of clan power in Mogadishu. They served specific clans and earned the support of the business class of Mogadishu for whom the primary purpose of the Islamic Courts was to provide 'security'.

The Islamic Courts were a huge success in dealing with criminality in north Mogadishu. But when it became apparent that the charismatic chairman of the north Mogadishu Courts, Sheikh Ali Dheere, was becoming a rival source of authority to the 'warlord-entrepreneur' Ali Mahdi, the latter demoted him and issued a 'decree' dismantling the whole Courts' establishment. This was the first of many setbacks from which, nevertheless, the principle of Islamic Courts has always recovered.

The temporary success of the Courts in north Mogadishu was not initially replicated beyond the 'green line' into south Mogadishu. The primary obstacle was the political leader of another dominant clan, General Mohamed Farah Aideed. General Aideed was another 'warlord-entrepreneur' and sworn enemy of Islamism. However, his death in 1996 gave political space for an experiment with Islamic Courts in south Mogadishu. The first court there was established in May 1998 by a sub-clan. The following year, two more sub-clans also established their own courts. Other clans followed suit. Though still rooted in local clan power, the south Mogadishu Courts were far more influenced by strands of political Islam and transnational Islamist and business finance networks than their predecessors in the north of the city. The link with political Islam came via former members of Al-Itihaad Al-Islaam ('The Islamic Union').

Originally a splinter group of a local Somali chapter of the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Itihaad had a covert existence during the final years of Siyad Barre's regime and only became openly active at the collapse of that regime. It was not organized through clan power. The Chairman, Sheikh Ali Warsame, was an Isaq from the north (now the self-declared Republic of Somaliland). The vice-Chairman, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, was a Hawiye from Galgadud in central Somalia, and was to become a key and controversial figure in the Islamic Courts' political leadership.

The Politicization of the Courts

The momentum of the Islamic Courts in south Mogadishu was slowed for a time by the creation of the Transitional National Government of Abdiqasim Hassan Salad at the Arta conference in Djibouti in 2000. Despite constant accusations, primarily from Ethiopia, that Abdiqasim's government was beholden to the Islamists, this was never the case.4 Indeed, it was only as the Arta government waned in power that the Islamic Courts strengthened once more. In 2003, a school teacher, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, frustrated with the lack of security among his Abgal sub-clan, revived the Islamic Courts system in north Mogadishu. By the end of 2004, he had been elected as the Chairman of all Islamic Courts operating across north and south Mogadishu.

By now, the growing influence of the Islamic Courts had begun to encroach upon the authority of the warlords of Mogadishu. While this was in part just another of Mogadishu's turf-wars, there was also a new ideological and political undercurrent to the rivalry. During 2005 Mogadishu was hit by a wave of unexplained assassinations and disappearances. Activists in the Islamic Courts claimed that covert US government operations were targeting their members, including the assassinations of the militia commanders of several courts, among them the Ifka Halane Islamic Court. These were not men with a religious background, but they were the driving force behind the implementation of court jurisdictions. It was in this context that a military force known as Al-Shabaab ('the Youth') emerged, related to but seemingly autonomous of the broad-based Courts movement.

Al-Shabaab fighters were suspected of killing security officers, some of them associated with the newly formed Transitional Federal Government of Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf and 'secular' politicians, in retaliation for killings of Islamic Court officials. It was also widely believed in Mogadishu that Somali warlords were helping the US government intelligence agents 'snatch' alleged terror suspects, particularly prominent Somali (and foreign) religious leaders. Not only did this show a flagrant disregard for what little sovereignty Somalia could claim, it also forced the Islamic Courts leaders to take a political stand. Matters came to a head in March 2006 when the long-standing covert operations took on a public face and warlords announced the formation of a new group called the Alliance for Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism.

However, it was a parochial issue - rivalry over Mogadishu's only, and vastly profitable, makeshift seaport at El Ma'an - that sparked the events which resulted in the takeover of Mogadishu by the Islamic Courts. A long-standing rivalry between businessmen Abukar Omar Adane and Bashir Rage turned violent. When Bashir Rage associated himself with the reportedly US-backed warlord Alliance, Abukar Adane called on the militias of the joint Islamic Courts, of whom he appeared to have been a benefactor. Key figures from Al-Shabaab participated in the fighting that defeated Bashir Rage, including another important Ayr figure to emerge from the Ifka Halane Court militia, Sheikh Adan Hashi Ayro.

The violence escalated beyond the initial flash-point, with serious clashes. There was also a gathering tide of public opinion against the warlords, who were perceived as self-serving and corrupt with little regard for the interests of the average Mogadishu citizen. The Islamic Courts Union, on the other hand, had a proven track record of restoring security and was associated with the provision of other social services and charitable works. The Courts had enjoyed the support of the business community. With the public and business community behind them, and a well-funded and well-motivated militia, the Islamic Courts took a stand against the warlord Alliance.

By the first weeks of April 2006, the Courts' militias had overrun much of the city, seizing heavy weaponry and collecting former clan militia members as new recruits. The key resources of El-Ma'an seaport and Isaley airfield, both north of Mogadishu, came under the Courts' sole control. Intermittent but serious confrontations continued throughout April and into the first half of May. In a symbolic victory, the Courts' forces captured the very building in which the warlord Alliance had been formed, and established an Islamic Court in its place. By early June, the Islamic Courts had complete control over Mogadishu, and most of the warlords had fled the city.

What started as an intervention by Al-Shabaab fighters in support of the businessman Abukar Omar Adane rapidly evolved into a thoroughgoing transformation of Mogadishu. The Courts achieved the unthinkable, uniting Mogadishu for the first time in 16 years, and re-establishing peace and security. The Courts undertook significant and highly symbolic public actions. Road-blocks were removed and even the ubiquitous piles of rubbish that had blighted the city for a decade or more were cleared. The main Mogadishu airport and seaport were reopened and rehabilitated for the first time in a decade. Squatters were made to vacate government buildings, illegal land grabs were halted, and special courts were opened to deal with the myriad claims for the restitution of property.

The Courts followed these practical actions with the declared intent of bringing an alternative means of governance to Somalia through sharia law. This was a decided shift away from factional politics based around clan loyalty. Officials from the Islamic Courts became increasingly critical in their rhetoric on the policies of Transitional Federal Government in Baidoa. Further provocative public statements were made about the status of the self-declared Republic of Somaliland in a future Somalia. A distinctly nationalistic - not to say irredentist - note was sounded by Sheikh Aweys' public criticism of Ethiopia's role in Somalia's affairs. This underlined the perceived threat that the Islamic Courts represented to neighbouring states with large Somali 'minority' populations.

Authors: Cedric Barnes - Harun Hassan
Affiliation:a School of Oriental and African Studies, London

format_quote Originally Posted by Cognescenti

If y'all want to invade Ethiopia, more power to you...just remember...they whooped the Italians with leather shields and wooden spears.

A superior Ethiopian force armed with 100k French rifles whooped an Italian invading force not with ''shields'' and ''spears''

History has shown a small well trained Somali army can easily cut up the much larger Ethiopian army if foreign actors stayed out of the conflict.