SOMALIA: Al-Qaeda on the march

ihadists attack Somalia

Al-Qaeda on the march

Barely supported by the West, Somalia's new government may buckle under the latest wave of jihadist assaults

AFP

WHEN Osama bin Laden issued a rambling audio recording of his views on Somalia earlier this year, the new authorities in the country's capital, Mogadishu, laughed hard. Mr bin Laden's thinking on this utterly failed state in the Horn of Africa seemed out-of-touch, even patronising. Yet only a few months after Somalia's latest "transitional" government was set up amid a rare burst of albeit cautious optimism, Somali radicals linked to al-Qaeda are gaining strength, while moderate Islamists, such as the country's new president, Sharif Ahmed, are losing ground.

A fresh flow of foreign fighters is said to be heading for Mogadishu. Some of them—Americans, Britons and Italians of Somali origin, as well as Arabs, Chechens, Pakistanis and Uzbeks—are no longer being hidden by their commanders but are being eagerly shown off to display the insurgents' global support.

When Ethiopia invaded Somalia with American encouragement in 2006, the aim was to fend off any kind of Islamist threat to Ethiopia and to catch the handful of al-Qaeda people sheltering in the country. The invasion and the ensuing air raids destroyed the first incarnation of Somalia's jihadists but the second seems to be proving stronger and fiercer. Robbed of their rationale by the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops and by Mr Ahmed's introduction of sharia law, they are hitting back harder.

In the latest fighting in Mogadishu, hundreds more people have been shot dead or injured, and tens of thousands displaced. The insurgents have tightened a noose around the capital by capturing the nearby towns of Jowhar and Mahaday. Such advances now let the jihadists control traffic between Mogadishu and central Somalia.

The fighters and their "technicals" (pick-up trucks often laden with heavy machineguns on the back) have also advanced on Beledweyne, a town close to the Ethiopian border. Their aim is apparently not to hold the town but to provoke Ethiopia into sending its troops back into Somalia, which could spur nationwide resentment towards the old enemy and more support for the radicals fighting against it. The Ethiopians are reported to be poised to make incursions back into Somalia.

Loosely arranged in cells of 20-30 fighters, the radicals of the Shabab ("Youth") and Hizbul Islam control much of south Somalia too. Across the country, they get a lot of cash from taxes, from the profits of pirates, from extortion and from donations by Arabs and Somalis in the diaspora.

The attackers have also been gingered up by an old Islamist commander, Hassan Dahir Aweys, recently back from exile in Eritrea. He has stirred up his Ayr sub-clan and served as a rallying point for the radicals, who lack a unifying figure of their own. Machineguns and ammunition, plus anti-tank weapons and plastic landmines that can be used as bombs, have been flown into airstrips controlled by the insurgents across the country, including some near the capital. Intelligence sources say Eritrea has been sending the stuff, possibly with Iran's help. The Eritreans deny this.

The jihadists are hitting Mr Ahmed's government before it has had time to rebuild its own forces. Western governments have agreed to fork out $213m to set up a 6,000-strong army and a police force of 10,000. But the UN continues to reject pleas—from its own special envoy, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, among others—for it to send in a serious peacekeeping force, at least big enough to secure the capital and its immediate vicinity, including the airport and seaport. The 4,000 or so Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers now propping up the shaky government under the aegis of the African Union (AU) are increasingly targeted by suicide-bombers.

Some 30 lethal suicide-bombs are thought to have exploded since five went off more or less simultaneously in October in Somaliland, which has managed to remain de facto independent (and fairly well-run) for several years, and in the semi-autonomous Puntland region, where various warlords, few of them jihadist, hold sway. In the quintuple bombing, an American of Somali origin blew himself up. Most bombers use suicide vests or blow up vehicles they are driving; the vest-wearers tend to be foreign. The targets are usually government buildings, ministerial convoys, the AU's base, businessmen, clerics and Somalis known to oppose the Shabab.

Mr Aweys describes the AU peacekeepers as "bacteria" that must be eradicated; whether such xenophobic rhetoric will inspire more Somalis to join the jihadists is unclear. Some observers say Mr Aweys is at risk of being assassinated by radicals who think him too nationalistic for the taste of Mr bin Laden's globalists.

One Somali commander says the aim of his insurgency is to "liberate Islam from Alaska to Cape Town". As radical fervour has grown in the past three years, many young Somalis now seem to take solace from the idea of a global jihad. "Radicalisation is now mainstream," says a seasoned monitor of events in Somalia. Young men, often at first lured by money, are then stirred by lectures and sermons into a desire for martyrdom. Many young Somalis in the diaspora, feeling vulnerable in their new countries, are targeted by recruitment videos on jihadist websites.

Often persuaded that Ethiopia serves as a proxy for the United States and European countries, some such men have become suicide-bombers. It is feared that attacks carried out by them in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, may be followed by similar ones on Nairobi, the capital of neighbouring Kenya, and in such distant places as London. Two of the would-be suicide-bombers in the second planned (but abortive) attack in July 2005 on London were Somali. While Somali pirates are a regional menace, Somali terrorists have international potential. On May 17th several local and foreign jihadists were reported to have been killed in Mogadishu when a bomb-making workshop blew up.

Towns captured by the jihadists are brought to order by what the Shabab callswa'yigelin ("sensitisation"), which has recently included the public amputation of hands for theft, public executions for "collaboration" with Western organisations, and grenade attacks on shopkeepers who show Western or Bollywood films or who play pop music or sell CDs of it. The jihadists also kill human-rights workers and journalists; almost none has returned to Mogadishu under the new regime.

Sometimes, however, the jihadists can be more pragmatic. In Baidoa, which used to host the country's parliament until it was chased away, the insurgents let the locals chew qat, a narcotic leaf that Somalis (and Yemenis) have long enjoyed, if they go from the town into the surrounding desert. But they must then return for a spell of wa'yigelin in the local mosque. If the jihadists win, they will bring in a harsh regime—with ripples across the region.

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