Somalia

A US air strike has killed Aden Hashi Ayro, the military head of al-Shabab - a violent Islamist militia group - in Somalia. Because the world's media could turn up in a nicely air conditioned briefing room to hear a CENTCOM spokesman say "al-Qaeda" about 75 times and, basically, because deep down we all get interested when shit gets blown up - Somalia has made it back into the headlines. It will remain there for the next few hours until shit gets blown up somewhere else in the world and until a different spokesman comes to another podium to explain why that shit got blown up.

Meanwhile Somalia will remain probably the most severe humanitarian crisis in the world; the fighting has displaced hundreds of thousands in a country already suffering massively from drought induced hunger and poverty. The fighting is predominantly between different clans. The media makes much of Islamist groups like al-Shabab that split from the wider Islamic Courts Union being "Islamist", and this is often followed with "linked to al-Qaeda" just to ram home their all round nastiness. They are very nasty, but then so are the people they are fighting so we shouldn't be selective with our disgust. The al-Qaeda link is also there, but it is also pretty irrelevant as al-Qaeda's experience in Somalia was about as messy as everyone else's. The Islamist insurgency in Somalia is predominantly focused on expelling the Ethiopian army who invaded Somalia a year ago in an effort to end the growing power of the Islamic Courts Union. Instead, the Ethiopians seem to have in the main provided convenient targets for al-Shabab, along with a nationalist cause to attract less extreme Somali fighters to the extremists' Jihad.

The importance of clan and sub-clan loyalties is also rarely discussed in reference to the Somali situation in the western media, but listen to Somalis and it is front and centre. Just as in Afghanistan the Taliban were rarely described as a specifically Pashtun phenomenon, in Somalia the fact that the Islamists tend to come from certain clan alliances is also missed. Certain clans are backing the Transitional Federal Government (which is supported by Ethiopia, the US and to some degree by the rest of the international community), other clans are not and therefore either side with the Islamists, or indeed are the Islamist militias. The anti-Ethiopian forces are also heavily supported by Eritrea, a basket-case totalitarian regime in its own right. The Eritreans have no ideological sympathy with the Islamists at all, they just like to kill Ethiopians and are happy to help others do that. Stuck in the middle of this hell, along with all the victimised, starving civilians is the African Union's amusingly titled "peacekeeping mission". This comprises of a few thousand Ugandans and Burundians and must qualify for one of the shittiest jobs anywhere: being neutral none of the sides seem to think much of them. It was presumably inter-clan intrigue that provided the U.S. with the intelligence it needed to get their guy. Of course they didn't quite just get their guy, they got all his mates and by the sounds of it some seven surrounding villagers as well. The U.S. keeps showing itself to be relatively indifferent to collateral damage in Somalia, which helps to bolster the Islamists in the eyes of some of their countrymen.