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Written by
Benjamin Joffe-Walt
Fighting began Friday night in the Somali capital after forces loyal to
the shaky, Western-supported transitional government shot mortars at an
insurgent base in the Somali capital Mogadishu. Clashes continued
unabated on Saturday, ending in Al Shabaab insurgents recapturing the
base and retaining their grip on most of the city.
Al Shabaab fighters said Mohamed Hassan, a 21-year old American from
Minnesota, was among the dead. At the time of printing it was not clear
when Mr Hassan had arrived in Somalia.
Al Shabaab, the militant wing of the Islamic Courts Union, a group that
controlled Mogadishu prior to the invasion by Ethiopian forces, had made
significant gains in the Horn of Africa nation. It now controls most of
Mogadishu and Southern Somalia.
The government has pledged to drive Al Shabaab insurgents out of the
capital upon the completion of Ramadan.
"It's a tug of war," Bashir Goth, an influential Somali blogger and the
editor of Awdal News, told The Media Line. "Sometimes they take an area,
then the government takes it back. It's extremely unstable."
As a jihadist movement, Al Shabaab members have cited links with Al-Qa’ida
although most analysts believe the affiliation to be minimal. The group
has several thousand fighters divided into regional units which are
thought to operate somewhat independently of one another.
"Al Shabaab is far from a unified organization," EJ Hogendoorn, the Horn
of Africa Project Director for the International Crises Group told The
Media Line. "There are several Al Shabaab affiliated groups that control
much of south-central Somalia, some of which have tried to take control
of Mogadishu. But because of the assistance the transitional government
is getting, Al Shabaab is not able to achieve this. So right now there's
a stalemate: while there is fighting centered around specific
neighborhoods, as far as we can tell there are no significant changes in
the military balance."
Goth argued that while support for the transitional government had
weakened the insurgents, they still posed a significant threat to the
viability of the Somali government.
"Al Shabaab is a cohesive, well-organized movement and they are
everywhere," Goth said. "These people are well funded and they could
potentially take power. They even nearly killed the president of
Somaliland."
The U.S. has launched selected air strikes against Al Shabaab leaders
thought to have ties to Al-Qa’ida, but analysts say this has only
increased their support among Somalis.
U.S. officials believe that dozens of Americans have entered Somalia to
join Al Shabaab's ranks. At least three Americans have been killed
fighting for Al Shabaab, including a Somali-American who killed himself
in a suicide attack last year.
"They are recruiting youth not only from America but also from Europe,"
Goth said. "They want to send a message that we can recruit your people
and we can harm you."
"This is a very dangerous development," he warned. "A suicide bomber can
get anywhere, and these people could come back at any time and cause
lots of damage."
Somali-Americans are recruited to join Al-Shabaab through secret
meetings, personal phone calls and Internet campaigns specifically
targeted at English speakers. As many as 20 young American men are
believed to have been recruited from Minnesota, home to the largest
population of Somali immigrants in the US.
"They are trying to recruit impressionable young Somali Americans who
are generally unemployed dropouts," Goth said. "They are just giving
them a kind of illusionary hope, saying 'you are not making it in
America. Come back to your roots, to Islam, and go to paradise.'"
Hogendoorn argued that Al-Shabaab's success can, in part, be credited to
its foreign recruitment and fundraising.
"Al Shabaab has a relatively sophisticated propaganda machine and
receives a fair amount of funding from outside of Somalia," Hogendoorn
said. "Most of this work is being conducted outside of Somalia by Al
Shabaab sympathizers."
"Because of 20 years of war there's a huge Somali population living
outside of Somalia," he said. "Those communities still maintain very
close ties to their relatives in Somalia, so when a Somali movement
tries to speak to the public, they speak both to Somalis in Somalia and
to Somalis in the diaspora."
Somalia has not had a functioning government since the 1991 ousting of
Mohamed Siyad Barre. The ensuing years have seen a chaotic system of
rival clans controlling various parts of the capital.
Al Shabaab began its insurgency in late 2006 with assassinations and
suicide bombings against the transitional government and aid workers,
particularly in Mogadishu.
The Western-backed Ethiopian military invaded the country in 2007, but
many analysts believe this augmented Al Shabaab's insurgency campaign,
and battles between Al Shabaab and Ethiopian forces caused roughly
400,000 people to flee the capital in August 2007.
The Ethiopians withdrew in January of this year after over 16 months of
Al Shabaab attacks on its forces.
African Union (AU) peacekeepers have also been in the country since
2007, but have made little impact with just over 3,000 troops from
Uganda and Burundi. Eleven Burundian soldiers were killed by Al Shabaab
in February of this year, the deadliest attack on AU peacekeepers since
their deployment.
The new President of Somalia's battered government is Sheikh Sharif
Sheikh Ahmed, a former schoolteacher and former official in the Islamic
Courts, which controlled Mogadishu and parts of Somalia prior to the
Ethiopian invasion. An Islamist supportive of sharia law himself, he
seeks to integrate Al Shabaab fighters into the transitional
government's forces.
There are over 2 million internally displaced people in Somalia, and UN
officials says there are over 1.3 million Somalis in need of emergency
food aid. Up to a fifth of the population is suffering from
malnutrition.
Source: The Media Line, September 06, 2009.
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