Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, Former Somali Strongman, Dies at 77

Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, Former Somali Strongman, Dies at 77

By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, a cantankerous former warlord who led Somalia's beleaguered transitional government as president from 2004 to 2008 and was forced to resign as the country sank deeper into chaos, died on Friday in Abu Dhabi. He was 77. The cause was complications of pneumonia, his family said. Mr. Yusuf, who was granted asylum in Yemen after he stepped down, had gone to Abu Dhabi for treatment, government officials said. He had undergone a liver transplant in 1996.

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Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed

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Mr. Yusuf was the first president of the Transitional Federal Government, which was founded in 2004 with the assistance of the United Nations. But he had little success in bringing the country's warring factions together and was widely seen as an obstacle to peace because of his refusal to deal with Islamist rebels and his clannish tendencies.

Since 1991, the 13 previous attempts at forming a functioning central government had failed amid clan-driven violence and the resistance of gun runners and other war profiteers. When Mr. Yusuf resigned, the government controlled only a few city blocks in a country nearly the size of Texas, with Islamist insurgents in charge of much of the rest.

The 2009 election of Mr. Yusuf's successor,Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, a moderate Islamist cleric, was greeted with joyful demonstrations in Mogadishu. Many viewed it as a first step on a path out of the violence that has plagued Somalia.

Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was born Dec. 15, 1934, in Barta and grew up in nearby Galkacyo. He is survived by his wife, Hawa Abdi Samatar, and four children.

A career soldier who was Somalia's military attaché to the former Soviet Union in the 1960s, Mr. Yusuf was jailed for six years for refusing to take part in the 1969 coup that put Mohammed Siad Barre in power.

Three years after his release in 1975, Mr. Yusuf tried to overthrow Mr. Barre but failed and fled to Kenya, where he recruited fighters for his guerrilla movement. He was backed by Ethiopia's socialist government but later had a falling out with it over Ethiopian claims to Somali territory. The Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam imprisoned him in 1985, and he was not released until the regime fell in 1991.

He spent much of the 1990s in his native Puntland, where he sought semiautonomous status to save the region from the chaos engulfing the rest of the nation. Aides described his style as ruthless, and many opponents were jailed or killed. There were also sporadic clashes over territory with the neighboring region of Somaliland, and he was deposed for a year over his attempts to increase his term of office in 2001.

Mr. Yusuf regained control of Puntland in 2002 with Ethiopian help, forging a new alliance with the new government there.

In 2004, Mr. Yusuf was elected president of Somalia by the National Assembly, having systematically undermined several attempts by others to form a government. At the time, he told lawmakers, "Somalia is a failed state and we have nothing," and he urged the international community to help disarm the militias. His inauguration was held in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi because of security concerns.

In 2006, he survived a suicide car bombing that killed his brother and several bodyguards. It was one of several assassination attempts.

When an Islamic alliance took control of Mogadishu, also in 2006, Mr. Yusuf invited Ethiopian troops into the country, with American backing. The Ethiopians routed the Islamist forces, but the presence of soldiers from a Christian nation in a mainly Muslim country made the government unpopular. It also encouraged Ethiopia's enemy Eritrea to offer the Islamists assistance, making Somalia a proxy war zone. The Islamists quickly began an Iraq-style insurgency.

While some Somali leaders favored sharing power with moderate Islamist insurgents, Mr. Yusuf refused, calling the Islamists terrorists. He tried to block a measure that would have brought moderate Islamists into the government.

"Yusuf has gone from being seen as the solution to being seen as the problem," a senior Western diplomat in Kenya told The New York Times in 2008.

Under pressure from foreign governments and internal foes, and facing the threat of a complete withdrawal by the Ethiopian forces that had propped up his administration, Mr. Yusuf decided to resign in December 2008.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.