NAIROBI,
Kenya — Somalia
is once again a raging battle zone, with jihadists pouring in from overseas,
preparing for a final push to topple the transitional government.
The
government is begging for help, saying that more peacekeepers,
more money and more guns could turn the tide against the Islamist radicals.
But the
reality may be uglier than either side is willing to admit: Somalia has become
the war that nobody can win, at least not right now.
None of the
factions — the moderate Islamist government, the radical Shabab
militants, the Sufi clerics who control some
parts of central Somalia, the clan militias who control others, the
autonomous government of Somaliland in the northwest and the semiautonomous
government of Puntland in the northeast — seem powerful enough, organized
enough or popular enough to overpower the other contenders and end the violence
that has killed thousands over the past two years.
Somalia
analysts say the main event, the government versus the Shabab, will drag on for
months, fueled by outside support on both sides. The United
Nations and Western countries see the transitional government,
however feeble, as their best bulwark against piracy and Islamist extremism in
Somalia, and are pumping in hundreds of millions of dollars for the
government’s security. At the same time, the Shabab are kept afloat by an
influx of weapons and fighters, much of it reported to be flowing through
neighboring Eritrea.
The Shabab,
more than anyone else, have succeeded in internationalizing Somalia’s conflict
and using their jihadist dreams to draw in foreign fighters from around the
globe, including the United States.
The Shabab, whose name means youth in Arabic, are a mostly under-40 militia who
espouse the strict Wahhabi version of Islam and are guided, according to
American diplomats, by another, better-known Wahhabi group: Al Qaeda.
Ahmedou
Ould-Abdallah, the top United Nations envoy for Somalia, said that there were
now several hundred foreign jihadists fighting for the Shabab. He noted that
they were “more motivated, better organized and better trained” than typical
Somali street fighters, who tend to be teenagers paid a few dollars a day to
charge blindly into battle with rusty Kalashnikov rifles. These young
combatants know as much about military tactics as they do about school, which is
not a lot. Class has essentially been out for the past 18 years, since
Somalia’s central government collapsed.
But the
Shabab have limitations, too. In the past few weeks, the Shabab and their
allies all but seized Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, and sealed the escape
routes out of the city. In the end, though, they were unable to overrun those
very last, but strategically vital, areas the government still controls, like
the port, the airport and the hilltop presidential palace.
The new
Shabab overseas recruits have imported to Somalia the tricks of Al Qaeda’s
trade, like remote-controlled explosives and suicide bombs. But as Iraq and Sri
Lanka have shown, insurgents need more than suicide bombs to take over a
country. They need overwhelming force, or a persuasive ideology and governing
strategy, all of which the Shabab currently lack. The only role that seems fit
for them right now is that of spoiler.
“The Shabab
can’t govern,” said Hassan Gabre, a retired engineer in Mogadishu. He said the
Shabab were simply part of Somalia’s industry of violence, trying to defend
“the anarchy regime.”
Shabab
clerics are quick to put their austere version of Islam into effect in the
territory they seize, recently amputating the hand of a convicted thief and
then dangling the lifeless, bloody results in front of a shocked crowd in
Kismayo, a port town in southern Somalia. But this may be just a gruesome side
show.
Mr.
Ould-Abdallah spoke of a “hidden agenda” and suggested that the real reason the
Shabab and their allies were in control of Kismayo was a confluence of sinister
business interests like gun-running, human smuggling and the underground
charcoal trade.
“There’s an
economic dimension here,” he said.
It was not
always like this. The Shabab were a crucial part of a functioning
mini-government in 2006, when an alliance of Islamic courts briefly controlled
much of south-central Somalia. The Shabab’s controversial religious policies
were tempered then by moderate Islamists, who delivered services like
neighborhood clean-ups and community policing, and as a result the whole
Islamic movement won grass-roots support. In the end, the experiment lasted
only six months, until Ethiopian troops, backed by American military forces,
invaded and drove the Islamists underground.
That
intervention failed. The Islamists returned as a fearsome guerrilla force and
the Ethiopians pulled out this January, setting Somalia more or less back to
where it had been in 2006, with 17,000 people killed in the process (according
to Somali human rights groups). Moderate Islamist
leaders then took over the transitional government, nominally protected by 4,300
African
Union peacekeepers.
But no one
is especially well liked in Mogadishu these days, not even the peacekeepers,
who may have the most dangerous peacekeeping mission of all. Many Somalis
turned against them after a deadly episode in February when a roadside blast
hit an African Union truck and the peacekeepers responded by firing wildly into
a crowded street. According to Somali officials, the peacekeepers killed 39
civilians, though the African Union said that the true figure was much lower
and that the people had died in a cross-fire. Radical Islamists are now calling
the African troops “bacteria.”
All this
could be an opportunity for the transitional government. After all, the new
president, Sheik Sharif
Sheik Ahmed, rose to popularity as a neighborhood problem solver,
best known for helping free kidnapped children.
But Sheik
Sharif’s government seems hobbled by the same tired, intractable clan divisions
and lack of skills that torpedoed the 14 previous transitional governments.
There have been glimmers of hope, such as the government passing a national
budget for the first time in years and using legitimate tax money from
Mogadishu’s port to pay its soldiers. But the bigger picture is grim. In the
past few weeks, it proved very difficult for the government even to organize
its various militias to jointly defend the few blocks it still controls.
The pattern
is clear, and may not be broken anytime soon: A weak government means more
violence, means weaker government, which means still more violence, and so
on.......