By Herbert Awuor
The war on Al-Shabaab is quickly taking a new twist; becoming more asymmetrical and expensive to fight, straining the efforts of Kenyan Defense Forces, African Union Mission to Somalia troops (Amisom), and TFG servicemen on the ground.
Last week, the New York Times reported that Abdisalan Hussein Ali, a young, talkative American born Somali raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, brought his own life to a bloody end in Mogadishu.
Ali was one of the two bombers who blew themselves up in a suicide attack that killed several African Union peacekeepers deployed under Amisom in Mogadishu last week. Before he died, Ali left a suicide note urging more Americans to join other mujahedeen in what he termed as jihad in Somalia.
Ali, therefore, is one of a large group of foreigners who have swelled the ranks of Al-Shabaab since the group gained prominence in 2006.
That contingent of foreign fighters – numbering in the hundreds according to experts – have changed the gene-pool of what was originally a nationalist movement aiming to impose an Islamic state in Somalia and turned the Shabaab into an extension of a global movement of Muslim extremists that has loyalties to Al-Qaeda.
Somalia analysts say it is this influential foreign contingent that has radicalised the Somali youth in Al-Shabaab and driven the evolution of the movement from a domestic insurgency into a criminal militant group with ambitions to strike far outside Somalia.
The foreign influence on Al-Shabaab goes back to the early 1990s.
This came along once Osama bin Laden was expelled from Saudi Arabia after the crown prince got fed up with his acerbic tirades against the presence of American troops in the Arabian Peninsula, and especially his opposition to the first Gulf war.
Bin Laden found a home in Afghanistan and later travelled to Sudan where he refined his plans for a global war against the United States.
To Al-Qaeda, Somalia offered a safe haven for its operations in the region and encouraged it to target the United States in Somalia and the Arabian Peninsula. The first Al-Qaeda operatives left Peshawar, Pakistan, transited through Kenya, and arrived in Somalia in February 1993. The group worked closely with Al-Ittihad Al-Islamiyya and established three training camps in Somalia.
“Abu Hafs, an Al-Qaeda operative from Egypt, expected Somalia would become a low-cost recruiting ground where disaffected Somalis in the failed state would readily accept Al-Qaeda and enthusiastically join the fight to expel the international peacekeeping force, briefly led by the United States in the Operation Restore Hope, which began arriving in Mogadishu in 1992. Somalia appeared to be, in the eyes of Al-Qaeda, another Afghanistan,” thus posits David Shinn, a professor at George Washington University.
Prof Shinn believes that Somalia proved to be a difficult territory to operate in due to labyrinthine clan loyalties in the country and the cost of corruption in places like Kenya, through which the foreign fighters needed to transit.
In his history of Al-Qaeda’s rise from a small organisation in the deserts of Afghanistan to one of the most successful fundamentalist groups in the world, journalist Lawrence Wright records that bin Laden briefly considered living in Somalia but decided against it after concluding he could not hide in a country where “it is considered good manners to gossip”.
Al-Qaeda surmised that Somalia was not Afghanistan, and the organisation was unable to gain the type of foothold they had established in the Middle East.
Al-Qaeda underestimated the cost of operating in Somalia. Getting in and out of the country was costly while expenses resulting from corruption in neighbouring states were high. Al-Qaeda experienced regular extortion from Somali clans and unanticipated losses when bandits attacked their convoys. It overestimated the degree to which Somalis would become jihadists, especially if there was no financial incentive, and failed to understand the importance of traditional Sufi Islam.
Unlike the tribal areas of Pakistan, it found a lawless land of shifting alliances that lacked Sunni unity. The primacy of clan ultimately frustrated Al-Qaeda’s efforts to recruit and develop a strong, unified coalition. The jihadi foreigners from Al-Qaeda concluded during this early initiative in Somalia that the costs outweighed the benefits.
Al-Qaeda’s foray into Somalia was not entirely fruitless. They landed the first blow when their affiliates killed 18 US servicemen who had gone to Mogadishu as peacekeepers; Somalia was later used as a base from which to launch the attacks in Kenya in August 1998 and November 2002.
But foreign involvement in the conflict in Somalia remained low-key until two separate factors triggered a flood of fighters from the huge Somali diaspora in Europe and the Americas.
The first was Ethiopia’s invasion of the country in 2006 which was used as a rallying point for Al-Shabaab recruitment, especially by its sophisticated propaganda wing which has a significant Internet presence.
The second was the stepping up of drone attacks by the Americans in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which led to the deaths of numerous senior and mid-level Qaeda leaders.
As a result, many of them fled to Somalia and Yemen. The Pentagon claims that the next major attack on America will emanate from either of these two countries.
The immediate victims of the flood of militants to the region, however, are Kenyans, Ugandans and Somalis. The attacks on military trucks in Kenya have been triggered by improvised explosive devices, an instrument widely used by Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The foreigners in Al-Shabaab ranks have also introduced tactics considered taboo and were unheard of previously in Somalia, such as suicide bombings and decapitations.
The first was carried out in 2006. Later in August 2010 they bombed football fans watching the World Cup final in Uganda. A lot of this, Prof Shinn writes, is the work of the foreign core of the Shabaab.
This large foreign influence in the Shabaab illustrates the scale of the challenge regional governments and their Western partners face in tackling the militant group.
As a Somalia government spokesman put it, the members of the Somali diaspora must be counselled to come back to build their fragile state and not to bomb it.
But this is not the only headache facing the Somali conflict. Al-Shabaab is desperately employing more horrifying tactics to win loyalty from the Somali masses.
Public decapitation of ‘traitors’ is the latest trademark. Only last week, two youth were on beheaded in Afmadow town, Southern Somalia, for allegedly spying for the Transitional Federal Government and Kenya Defence Forces.
The heads of the two young men, who were seized by the militants a few days earlier, were displayed in the town streets, according to area residents. The incident, no doubt, has caused fear in the general public.
The youth were reportedly accused of having links with the Government of Kenya and the TFG. They were also accused of directing Kenyan planes that carried out air raids in Jubaland.
Recently, Al-Shabaab militants promised to punish anybody found working with the TFG and the Kenyan troops that crossed into Somalia in mid-October in hot pursuit of the militia.
This development has no doubt hampered the progress of Kenyan, Amisom and TFG troops. Fighting a faceless enemy freely mingling with the masses has made the forces change tact.
Thus the announcement that Kenya and Ethiopia are willing to bolster the African Union Mission to Somalia by deploying troops there represents an interesting turn of events that portends well but must also be pursued with caution.
Although Kenya has been one of the most consistent supporters of enhancing the Amisom force beyond the 9,700 Ugandan and Burundi troops already deployed, it has, until now, resisted placing its forces under that mission.
By offering to deploy under Amisom, Kenya has given the mission a major boost in profile that will stir more solid commitment from wavering countries that have indicated solidarity and little else since the UN Security Council endorsed the force to protect the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia.
This may form the basis of the announcement within 24 hours of Kenya, that Ethiopia was ready to follow suit.
In a practical way, an effective Amisom reduces the burden to be borne by the Kenya Defence Forces in their current operations in southern Somalia.
Since this force receives substantial logistical, training, medical and emolument support from the United Nations Support Mission to African Union Mission to Somalia (UNSOA), Kenyan forces operating under its command will work towards the set national goal of neutralising the Al-Shabaab as a security threat at someone else’s cost.
But a number of challenges impede realising the full potential of the AU mission in sowing the seeds of peace in Somalia.
The most critical is that Amisom has a pitiably narrow mandate; to protect the TFG whose authority has been limited to parts of Mogadishu.
This way, Ugandan and Burundi troops have been held back and under-utilised their potential to weaken Al-Shabaab, while many times being susceptible to costly attacks.
Countries now bolstering Amisom should seek an enhanced mandate from the Security Council to defend Somalis and not just the TFG, thus buttressing the collective responsibility to protect.
More importantly, the reality today calls for peace enforcement and not a mere security cordon for government leaders. A related problem has been the weaknesses in the unified command.
While formally a unified force, Amisom has remained broadly an umbrella name for two distinct forces with very varied access to logistical resources, unequal possession of protective gear and often varied internal systems. Yet the channels for UN support have tended to compound rather than reduce this incoherence.
Resources from UNSOA have often been channeled to contributing countries with cases reported when governments have diverted money meant for their soldiers in Somalia elsewhere.
Kenya and Ethiopia should seek to remould the unified command and systems of Amisom and raise the benchmark for individual country force preparedness and level of relevant material as part of enhancing the capacity of that force to help crash Al-Shabaab.
An efficient, motivated and well supplied Amisom with an enhanced mandate would be a well suited force to take over the assignment of pacifying Somalia after the current joint operations between KDF and TFG troops.
First, by increasing the number of players going after Al-Shabaab, this force reduces the individual risk carried by Kenya in case the assignment is drawn out over a longer period.
Secondly, by enhancing the mission’s ability to stabilise zones liberated from Al-Shabaab. Few things are worse than being bogged down with security responsibilities in liberated areas while the world declares a vacuous solidarity without helping to fill the void in peace enforcement. Ethiopia experienced that five years ago.
Kenya and other nations with troops on the ground could do with an exit plan that passes the burden of consolidating the gains now being recorded on the battlefield to another group even as the TFG looks to become a real government.
While Kenya has made the right gestures both in regional diplomacy and on the ground since it crossed into Somalia, the relatively low cost so far incurred should not delude anyone about the perpetual risks and potential of reversals that are entailed in going to war.
Building a coalition of countries willing to share the burden, and reducing the need to keep her forces out of her borders for a long time is important in reducing the chances of failure.
HERBERT AWUOR
