On Somalia and relatively cuddly pirates.

This week's bedtime reading - because this is just what a crazy guy I am - has been the most recent International Crisis Group report on Somalia, called "Somalia's Divided Islamists". It is, as ever, fascinating and once again reminds me that first thing to understand about Somali politics is that don't really understand Somali politics. Fortunately the Crisis Group has some people who really do and can thus help the rest of us.

Anyway - on a vaguely related note - this week's This American Life was on the theme of hostages. They open with an interview with commercial hostage negotiator and anti-kidnapping trainer. Ira asked him where in the world was the best place to get kidnapped if you really had to get kidnapped and held hostage. His advice was Somali pirates seem to be the least interested in hurting their hostages of all the various political and professional kidnapping rackets around the world. Perhaps they know that pirates these days are the fun-loving characters of a million nautically themed childrens books and want to conform to the stereotype. Expect eye-patches and comedy inflatable parrots next.

Somalia-UK, and other bits and bobs of interest

Some quality reporting from the UK's Channel 4 from last month that I only just stumbled across, looking at the links between British Somalis and suicide bombings in Somalia/Somaliland.



Don't just watch the vid, read Jonathan Rugman's report as well. Also if this is your type of thing, check the Jamestown report that Rugman mentions, on the various stories of western Somalis who have gone back to fight - Americans, British, Canadians, Swedes and possibly Norwegians - but no Finns mentioned. I wonder if any young Somalis have gone back to fight for any of the other groups besides the Jihadists? The answer could be no - in which case it leads to the question why not? Why aren't, say, Puntland nationalists or Les éradicateurs of the TFG as an attractive a cause for a kid in a western city as wack-job jihadism? It sort of makes Olivier Roy's globalised Islam point for him. Alternatively, the answer could be that Somalis have gone back to fight for other groups - their clan militia, the TFG etc. and we just haven't heard about it because it's not then part of the 'terrorism-link' game the media and some analysts like to play. If British Tamil kids go and get themselves blown up in Jafna fighting for the Tigers, frankly who in the media gives a shit? I hope MI5 do, but it's not going to make Channel 4 News, let alone the front page of Sun*.

Apropros to nothing and probably only of interest to those who have similar research/geeky interests to me; I note the Jamestown report is written by James Brandon. I was at a seminar with James last year, and because he was at from the Centre for Social Cohesion, I was a little bit suspicious of where he was coming from. So I noticed with interest he's now at the Quilliam Foundation. Hmm.... I think: "from the outwardly neoconservative, to the group just called neoconservative by it's critics... interesting", but looking just a wee bit further into it, I found this quite amazing op-ed by James in CiF. Well said, Mr. Brandon. If you ever need to write a resignation letter, it would be good to do it with the honesty and clarity of James' piece.

*And just as a side note, the Sun has been caught making up nasty-Muslim stories. Again. The victim of the Sun's lies is thirty grand richer, and good for him, but at Pickled Politics they have a few suggestions of how to make a paper really think twice before running this sort of shit.

"The most dangerous place in the world"

Long time readers of this blog will know that I have an interest in Somalia. There is an excellent article explaining Somalia's recent history and current desperate situation by Jeffrey Gettleman of the NYT in this week's Foreign Policy magazine.

Print a copy off and read it during your coffee break. It's a fine example of clarity and approachability in dealing with a complex story that will give you a solid introduction to this sad country.

The Somalis of Leicester

(Photo: "Leicester - It'll be good when it's finished" by Andrew M Butler on Flickr)

This weeks Radio 4 Choice is about Leicester - which will be within a few years Britain's first 'plural city' where no ethnicity forms a majority. This does not actually mean that any one current ethnic minority will form a new majority, whites will still be the largest group in Leicester, but they will no longer be more than half of the city's population.

Leicester is quite interesting demographically because its big immigrant inflow, unlike say the northern mill towns, was only 30 years ago and was East African Indians who have tended to be very business-minded. But what I found more interesting was the interviews with more recently arrived Somali families - most of whom moved from Holland because they wanted to be in more a multicultural society than the Netherlands. Their experiences in the UK seem mixed, but what the programme noted was that those that came were all pro-education (with one kid who arrived in the UK at 13 only knowing what English he had heard in music, who then 3 years later got 21 GCSEs! For non-UK readers, that is more than double the number of subjects that a bright kid would normally do at school).

I've been interested in the phenomenon of Somali movement within Europe for the last three years, when I first started hearing anecdotal evidence of it. But now I'm in no doubt - there is an outflow of aspirational young single Somalis and Somali families from Holland and Scandinavia to the UK. I've now heard this from the UK-end and from an odd variety of sources who have noticed in Scandinavia that "their Somalis" are leaving. The UK welfare state isn't as comprehensive as for example in Finland or Sweden, so clearly the old racist line of "they've come here to get a free house" isn't true. Clearly a growing Somali population in the UK has some social policy implications - although as it seems that most Somalis go to the UK to start a business or get higher education, these probably aren't major challenges. It would seem to have much bigger implications for the countries where the Somalis are leaving. If the best and brightest of one of your immigrant communities ups sticks and moves to another country, the community that remains is likely to present a higher proportion of social policy issues. This is exactly what a Danish Imam told me was clearly happening in his city, increasing racial tensions. Another very serious question is whether it suggests that there is a systemic failure in the integration policies of social democracies such as Finland or the Netherlands.

I had a funny conversation with a professional Finnish-Somali guy recently, in that both of us had become interested in the politics of Minnesota for exactly the same reason. Minneapolis seems to have become the promised land for the Somali diaspora - where the community has thrived through its entrepreneurship (and supportive policies from the state) and become integrated into the city's political life in the traditional way new immigrant populations in the United States always have. Now they are important within the Democratic Party, and as a result some of the Minnesota's congressmen and its senator have become leading figures in the international efforts to find peace in the Horn of Africa. The US model of integration (which seems to be to a great extent leave people to their own devices) has successes where the European social democracies do not.

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.

Terrorism and failed states

I just love it when I'm right.

A couple of years ago it struck me that terrorists groups don't want to operate from failed states despite what we have heard from dozens of western politicians, military leaders and various 'experts' in the media. It's a point I've been trying to argue since. It is obvious really: failed states are awful places to live - ask a Somali refugee - and things don't work there and that includes for terrorists. Secondly when the government of a state fails, other governments stop respecting its sovereignty and feel free to intervene directly: in the early 1990s the Ethiopians repeatedly entered Somalia to kick the crap out of al-Ittihad al-Islami, a radical group they saw as threatening. After the genocide in Rwanda, the new Rwandan government repeatedly sent troops into the Congo to hunt down Interahamwe militias. Pre-9/11, al-Qaeda wasn't in Afghanistan because it had no government, it did - the Taliban was the de facto government. Bin Laden picked it because it had a government he could co-opt.

So I was chuffed to read in the executive summary of the newest report from West Point's excellent Combatting Terrorism Center the following:

Conventional wisdom suggests that Somalia, a failed state, would be an ideal safe haven for al-Qa’ida. Our analysis, however, indicates that weakly governed regions such as coastal Kenya, not failed states like Somalia, provide an environment more conducive to al-Qa’ida’s activities. In Somalia, al-Qa’ida’s members fell victim to many of the same challenges that plague Western interventions in the Horn. They were prone to extortion and betrayal, found themselves trapped in the middle of incomprehensible (to them) clan conflicts, faced suspicion from the indigenous population, had to overcome significant logistical constraints and were subject to the constant risk of Western military interdiction.

It's always great when the big boys agree with you. The whole report can be downloaded here, or look here at some of the other academically original and important work being done at the CTC.

Who cares about Somalia(?)

The title question-mark is in brackets as you can read this either as a question or, more likely, simply as a statement. The Economist does care and continues to cover Somalia more seriously than most media, but you could hear their correspondent's anger at the end of last week's report :

"It is a sad measure of the insouciance with which the world treats Somalia that it has managed to drop out of the headlines in the space of a week."

After a few weeks over Christmas when you couldn't move for Mogadishu news, we're back to a collective shrug of the shoulders. There were more US air-strikes last week that hardly got a mention, but seem to have been no more successful than the first round which, according to one US officer interviewed by the IHT, killed none of the leaders of the Islamic Courts Union, or the suspected al-Qaeda they were believed to be sheltering. Who the USAF did kill in the first strikes is not clear. The Ethiopians are starting to pull out (due to malaria of all things, according to the IHT), the Transitional Government doesn't have the power to really control Mogadishu, and ICU sympathetic-fighters are re-emerging to start fighting the government. The idea that the ICU had been "routed" always seemed rather fanciful as the ICU force was a conglomeration of localised militias rather than some unitary military entity. Hence it would seem logical that when the power of the Ethiopian military pushed against them they would just split back up into their original constituent parts. In that sense the Ethiopians did beat them completely but of course that doesn't take the danger away: just as the US has found in Iraq, you can make an army concede totally, but it doesn't mean that the people who made that army up, can't fight you successfully in tiny groupings later with guerilla tactics.

The African Union is still discussing sending peacekeepers but has massive financial, not to mention political constraints. Once the Ethiopians leave Somalia there is no reason to expect that the status quo of continually warring factions, with the Transitional Government once again just one of them, will not return - except for now there will be more anti-US and anti-western feeling after the air attacks and the US support for the Ethiopian invasion. No western country seems to be bothered enough to shovel money, let alone men or resources, to the AU to help out. So as the Washington Times correctly puts it: "the window of opportunity is apparently beginning to close."

Somalia

Every day for about the last two weeks I've been thinking I should write something about Somalia, as it a subject that I have followed since starting this blog. But after having had to scrape around to read decent reporting and analysis on the country for most of last year, the current fighting has brought with it a veritable avalanche of attention to what was previously a rather marginal part of the world. Suddenly there has been almost too much news on Somalia to read and listen to.

For work I've followed US counter-terrorism operations in Africa for the last year and half quite closely. The US forces in Djibouti, CJTF-HOA, - where presumably the AC-130 that was trying to kill the al-Qaeda suspects (and probably failing) came from - have kept a much lower media profile than the smaller but more publicised Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI). My feeling has been that the CJTF-HOA has never really needed to justify its budget - it is run by CENTCOM, unlike the the TSCTI which is an EUCOM operation, and there are very few serious analysts of the region who dispute that its likely that the people who were responsible for bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania had probably found refuge in Mogadishu, and were probably being sheltered by people who were in some way connected to the Islamic Courts Union. The TSCTI's claim to be helping to secure the Sahara against terrorists is much more tenuous.

But despite the ICU-al Qaeda link, coverage in the west that said the ICU was controlled by al-Qaeda, was just over-egging it to fit Somalia more neatly into the "War on Terrorism" discourse. It was clear even back at the start of last summer that the ICU was an unwieldy conglomeration of different interests, including differing clan loyalties. This probably accounts for its bad strategic decision making and its disintegration in the face of the Ethiopian advance. Yet disintegration is very far from being a rout, as the disintegration of the Iraqi Army in February 2003 so clearly shows. It would appear that many of the Islamist fighters "slipped away" taking off their uniforms if they ever had them in the first place and just going home. There have already been guerilla attacks on Ethiopian and Transition Federal Government (TFG) forces, and the Ethiopians are saying they want to leave soon, as they obviously see more of the same on the horizon and don't want their own mini-Iraq. This is causing American nervousness about a vacuum resulting; the TFG's forces are small and seem to comprise mainly of militiamen from the various factions currently behind the TFG, it is not clear that they could provide security without the support of the Ethiopian army.

The TFG is not starting off from a strong position. It has international support although the Arab League are whining. But within the country its seems that the population is yet to be convinced. In the last few days, I have read and heard two different Somali women saying that the Islamists had brought security to Mogadishu. This means the TFG - with African Union support (and that will need wider international support) - will have to rapidly make sure they can also provide human security to the population to the same degree or higher. This will test the resilience of the TFG, which is just as much an unwieldy coalition as the ICU was - but perhaps without the unifying ideology that religion provided the ICU. Yet the biggest hurdle for the TFG is that it is seen as a puppet of the Ethiopians and to some degree the US. This why the US air strike, particularly if the reports of civilians deaths whilst the targets escaped turn out to be true, was a bad idea. The AC-130 gunships seem rather blunt weapon, and the impression that it gives is that the US is indifferent to lives of uninvolved civilians, leaving aside all questions of sovereignty. As well as just further souring relations with the Muslim world generally, it clearly destabilise the TFG specifically in the eyes of Somalis by offending their nationalism. These points were being hammered home by guests on the NPR Dianne Rehm show yesterday, including Michael Scheuer - the former head of the CIA bin Laden unit.

That'll have to do for now, but I will return to this subject soon.

Somalia and Ethiopia

I've mentioned Somalia a number of times here before (see here, here and here). I don't know that much about the country but I've done some reading trying to understand more about the current situation, in particular reading the Crisis Group's reports on this "failed state". The rise of the Islamist Islamic Courts Union (ICU) has brought the country back into the international media, but it seems difficult for at least the English language media, and the US press in particular, to get far beyond their "Islamism/terrorism" paradigm. As any undergrad student of international relations or security studies should know there is the concept of "security complexes": groups of states whose actions tend to have greater security implications for each other. These are generally regional, the Middle East, South Asia etc., but don't have to be in the modern world. Somalia is in the Horn of Africa security complex - it is joined by history, ethnicity, enviromental competition, un-finished conflicts and many other issues to the countries that suround it. To look at what is happening in Somalia now only in the light of the professed ideology of the ICU and their various militias, is to miss probably 90% of what is happening. Of course that 10% is probably the only reason why the US government probably cares at all.

I mentioned the earliest reports of the Ethiopian troops in the country back in July, and now there is extensive evidence from the UN that Eritrea (amongst others) is supplying arms to the Courts' militias. There seems to be little reason for this beyond the fact that Ethiopia has picked the other side. For those who don't know, Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a particularly bloody and pointless war from 1998 to 2000 over their border, in which tens of thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. The fighting deteriorated into trench warfare reminiscent of the first world war. It is one of those wars that has just completely escaped the attention of the west: as US secretary of state James Baker said of Yugoslavia as it collapsed into a bloody warfare and slaughter - "we don't have a dog in this fight". The same was true about Ethiopia-Eritrea; none of the rich world particularly cared either way. It was left for underfunded UN mission to try and enforce the ceasefire and stop the two countries from going back to war. But the other great sadness of the war is that it worsened the freedom and human rights situation in both countries. Ironically, the leaders of both before Eritrean independence from Ethiopia had fought together against the oppressive Ethiopian communist regime that ruled during the Cold War. Yet neither set of leaders seem to have been able to avoid the African leaders' disease of coming to resemble those you overthrow, like the pigs of Animal Farm.

The Eritrean regime went down this path steadily after independence in 1991, and with seemingly little care about what the rest of the world thought about them. Ethiopia has been different and the government has done good things for its people leading to much support from the aid community and in particular the British Government. But as Prime Minister Meles Zenawi felt power slipping away, he has become increasingly oppressive. As the Economist puts it (subscribers only I think):

"An instinct for self-preservation may explain the former rebel fighters' return to Soviet methods. Things began to fall apart last year when a disorganised opposition disputed the results of a general election. Street protests followed in the capital in June and again in November. Around 80 people were believed to have been killed, including some police, after which opposition leaders, journalists, human-rights activists and businessmen were arrested. Many have since been charged with treason and genocide.

The government promised a speedy trial but has reneged, dragging out the process while keeping it far from view. Most of those arrested are still languishing in Kaliti prison in Addis Ababa. The cells there are baking hot by day, freezing by night, infested with roaches and mice, and thick with mud in the rainy season. The government has so far used a mix of spin and harassment of journalists (local more than foreign) to avoid international condemnation. But that may be changing.

An independent commission into the June and November killings has become an embarrassment. The government had stacked the commission with its supporters but eight out of ten of them still decided that the government had used excessive force. The commission members claim Mr Zenawi tried to get them to reverse their decision earlier this year; when that failed the government sought to bury the findings. The head of the commission and his deputy fled to Europe, fearing for their safety. Their investigation says at least 193 people were killed, nearly all by the security forces, including 40 teenagers, some shot at close range, others strangled. Some 20,000 young Ethiopians were said to be imprisoned in labour camps, though a government spokesman calls this “absolute rubbish”.

The government is spending more on its secret police as well as on state media. Well-placed sources claim an Israeli-trained unit now monitors e-mail and blocks opposition websites. Yet there is also disloyalty in the security apparatus. Berhanu Nega, the imprisoned mayor-elect of Addis Ababa, managed to write a book in Kaliti entitled “Dawn of Freedom” that is now being widely distributed in samizdat. Some people say 200,000 of the opposition calendars have been sold, often for several times their cover price."

On the other hand the Somali Islamist seems to be running on a law and order ticket! In the past few days they have used their forces to retake a ship seized by pirates, freeing the crew (the seas off Somalia have in the last decade and a half become notorious for pirates), and cracking down on drugs - in this case Khat, an incredibly common substance in those regions. Yet from the American self-styled 'anti-Jihadist' right, such as in this case the widely read and quoted Jawa Report, we are still getting this sort of 'advanced analysis':

"...the Ethiopia (and U.S.) backed Somalian interim government (which controls very little actual territory) has rejected a peace deal with the African Taliban [he means the ICU]. To whatever extent we are arming the opposition[he means the 'oppostion to the ICU', which is confusingly the interim government], we need to step up our efforts.

Some in the Ethiopian ex-patriot community have reminded me in the past that the Ethiopian government isn't exactly immune from charges of corruption and doesn't have the greatest human rights record itself. Maybe not, but in war you look for help from nations with mutual interests and not ones that are perfect.

The U.S. has plenty of experience fighting proxy wars from our experience with the Cold War. It's high time we began to use that experience in the Horn of Africa."

Mr. Jawa should listen to his Ethiopian friends a bit more. As likely refugees from political oppression they might have a bit more perspective on his "my enemy's enemy is my friend" logic. The premises of his argument are a mixture of the sickening and the laughable; firstly that the US should arm any old warlord or totalitarian regime who says they are fighting Islamists ('cos Islamist are, like, all bad and terrorists and stuff don't ya know?). And then the second - that the US experience of fighting proxy wars during Cold War suggests they should try the same again! Can anyone say "Daniel Ortega"?

Ethiopia in Somalia

Despite the ongoing war in Lebanon attracting the world's attention, things keep happening elsewhere. At the end of the BBC World Service news that I was listening to whilst cycling home from work (38 kms ridden today!), there was a report that a BBC correspondent had seen Ethiopian troops in Somalia near the seat of the provisional government in the town of Baidoa (see the BBC map to the right).

The Ethiopians are supporting the interim government against the Islamic Courts Militias who now control all of Mogadishu and large swathes of Somalia beyond the capital. The Economist described most Somalis as "loathing" Ethiopia so it does not bode well for stability - particularly because some of the senior activist in the Islamic Court Militias began their activism in secessionist groups within the Somali populated area of Ethiopia - known as Ogaden. This explains Ethiopia's support for the secular provisional government (that actually governs very little and currently meets in an abandoned warehouse) and its antipathy to the Islamists who it sees as a danger to its internal stability if Ethiopian ethnic-Somali Muslims become radicalised.

Somalia: unravelling the threads of the Mogadishu fighting

The extensive fighting in Mogadishu over the last week has brought Somalia back to international attention for a few days. Described as “a proxy battle between al-Qaeda and Washington”, this would seem to be over-egging the cake but not completely wrong.

The fighting is between a bunch of Mogadishu warlords who have delightfully re-branded themselves the “Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism” (who might as well have just gone the whole hog and called themselves “Team America, F*ck Yeah!” - a joke for the South Park fans, please ignore if you aren't!) and the militias of the “Islamic Courts”. Connecting the courts to al-Qaeda is a stretch, as they have only recently and rather tenuously been connected to local Jihadi activists. The al-Qaeda affiliated Jihadi group in Somalia that people who are interested in these things tend to have heard if is al-Ittihaad al-Islami (AIAI). It appears to have its origins in the spread of Saudi-sponsored Salafi ideas to Somalia in the 1970s, and emerged in the 1980s as a party of dawa (preaching). It was not until the collapse of the Somali state in 1990 when Siad Barre was deposed that they began to take up arms. They involved themselves in the ethnically-Somali areas of Ethiopia in the 1990s committing acts of terrorism against the Ethiopian state. Any interest in the group in the West seems only to have come once they involved themselves with al-Qaeda operatives in the mid-1990s who were preparing for the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam in 1998, but it was their acts in Ethiopia that led to their downfall. In 1996 and early 1997 the Ethiopian army took advantage of the fact that Somalia had no government to complain and entered the country attacking AIAI’s camps and killing many of its members. Since that time AIAI has faded from sight; some still believe it exists as an organisation but the Crisis Group does not believe this is the case (p.9-10) – pointing out that many of its former leaders have now taken up public and non-revolutionary positions in Somali life. One of still radical former-AIAI leaders, Hassan Dahir Aweys, seem to be the ideologue leading Aden Hashi ‘Ayro, the leader of a new, nameless Jihadi group which is active now in Somalia and has been linked to numerous murders of foreign aid workers in the country and other terrorist acts. ‘Ayro and his militia is also said to be now sheltering foreign al-Qaeda members in Mogadishu, including individuals that the US has sought ever since the embassy bombings.

The Islamic or Shari’a courts that are providing a type of justice system across southern Somalia are in the words of the Crisis Group: “widely touted as the most visible evidence of the creeping influence of Islamist groups. Most courts, however, are less a product of Islamist activism than of Somalia’s two most common denominators: clan and the traditional Islamic faith.”(p.19) And further that: “their heterogeneous membership and the diversity of their supporters mean that attempts to label the Shari’a system ‘extremist’, ‘moderate’ or any other single orientation are futile. In reality, the courts are an unwieldy coalition of convenience, united by a convergence of interests.”(p.21) They have gained much public support even from those who really do not agree with their conception of Shari’a because they have brought a degree of order to a lawless society, paralleling in many ways the rise of the Taliban in Southern Afghanistan in the mid-90s. What started as independent courts generally operating for distinct clans has become a wider system led by “the Supreme Council of Islamic courts”. Individual courts contribute militia forces to make up one larger and powerful fighting force. The Supreme Council is led by Sheik Sharif Ahmad who says the courts are not supporting foreign Jihadis: “There are no fugitives from Al Qaeda or any other organization, as the US and Ethiopian intelligence services are claiming.” But the Crisis Group research suggest the opposite – despite having denounced ‘Ayro’s group in late 2004, the Supreme Council in 2005 accepted him becoming the commander of one the sub-militias contributed to the over-all Court system’s forces.

This makes its hard to take Sheik Sharif at his word, and gives the “Team America” warlords a link to hold onto as they pursue their own interests under the banner of counter-terrorism. I will return to this issue in another post, because the role of, and the divisions within, Somalia’s fledgling transitional government deserves further examination as does the US’s policy.