Back to 1991

[Jiiroow Bakaal]

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/09/07/world/africa/07somalia-8.html

 

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/09/07/world/africa/07somalia.html

 

 

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

Saturday, September 10, 2011

 

DHOBLEY, Somalia — Adan Dahir Hassan sits in a bald office, wires dangling from the ceiling, handing out death sentences. Recently installed by an Islamist warlord, Mr. Hassan recalled how he had ordered a soldier who had killed a civilian, possibly by accident, to be delivered to the victim’s family, which promptly shot him in the head

 

“It’s Islamic law,” said Mr. Hassan, the professed district commissioner of this bullet-riddled town. “That’s what makes the community feel happy.”

 

For the first time in years, the ShababIslamist group that has long tormented Somalis is receding from several areas at once, including this one, handing the Transitional Federal Government an enormous opportunity to finally step outside the capital and begin uniting this fractious country after two decades of war.

 

Instead, a messy, violent, clannish scramble is emerging over who will take control.

 

This is exactly what the United States and other donors had hoped to avoid by investing millions of dollars in the transitional government, viewing it as the best antidote to Somalia’s chronic instability and a bulwark against Islamic extremism.

 

But the government is too weak, corrupt, divided and disorganized to mount a claim beyond Mogadishu, the capital, leaving clan warlords, Islamist militias and proxy forces armed by foreign governments to battle it out for the regions the Shabab are losing.

 

Already, clashes have erupted between the anti-Shabab forces fighting for the spoils, and roadblocks operated by clan militias have resurfaced on the streets of Mogadishu, even though the government says it is in control. Many analysts say both the Shabab and the government are splintering and predict that the warfare will only increase, complicating the response to Somalia’s widening famine.

 

“What you now have is a free-for-all contest in which clans are unilaterally carving up the country into unviable clan enclaves and cantons,” said Rashid Abdi, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, which studies conflicts. “The way things are going, the risk of future interregional wars and instability is real,” Mr. Abdi added, “even after Al Shabab is defeated.”

 

More than 20 separate new ministates, including one for a drought-stricken area incongruously named Greenland, have sprouted up across Somalia, some little more than Web sites or so-called briefcase governments, others heavily armed, all eager for international recognition and the money that may come with it.

 

Officials with the 9,000-strong African Union peacekeeping force, the backbone of security in Mogadishu, say they are deeply concerned by this fragmentation, reminiscent of Somalia’s warlord days after the government collapsed in 1991.

 

“What was holding everybody together is now gone,” lamented an African Union official, who asked not to be identified because he was departing from the official line that all is well in Mogadishu. “All these people who came together to fight the Shabab are now starting to fight each other. We weren’t prepared for this. It’s happening too fast.”

 

American officials are struggling to keep up with Somalia’s rapidly evolving — or some say devolving — politics, saying they have lost faith in the transitional government’s leaders and are now open to the idea of financing some local security forces, part of what they call a “dual track” approach to supporting the national and local governments at the same time.

 

“It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to have a local leader with some charisma and grass-roots support,” said one American official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

 

Perhaps no area better illustrates the creeping warlordism than Dhobley, a forlorn little town near the Kenyan border contested by two new militias, one led by a dapper, French-educated intellectual, the other by an Islamist sheik who used to be in league with the Shabab.

 

People are starving here, victims of Somalia’s famine, 70-pound adults and tiny babies with skin cracked like old paint. But there are few aid organizations around. They have been scared off by the hundreds of undisciplined militiamen, who constantly fire off their guns and have killed each other in recent weeks.

 

The gunmen in solid green fatigues belong to Ahmed Madobe, the Islamist sheik-turned-warlord who just a few years ago was hunted down by American forces, wounded by shrapnel during an air raid and then spirited away to an Ethiopian prison.

 

“I wasn’t just in the Shabab; I helped found it,” Sheik Madobe boasted the other day, as he sat in a tent on Dhobley’s outskirts, flanked by dozens of baby-faced fighters. He said he had quit the Shabab because “they’re killers,” though several analysts said it was a more prosaic breakup over smuggling fees.

 

Also prowling around Dhobley, between crumbling buildings and stinking piles of animal carcasses from the drought, are hundreds of gunmen in camouflage fighting for another man, known as the Professor.

 

Mohamed Abdi Mohamed, better known as Professor Gandhi, is a former university lecturer who says he holds two French Ph.D.’s — in geology and anthropology. He has formed his own state, Azania, complete with two houses of representatives and special seats for women, though he is not actually in Dhobley and seems to spend a lot of time in Kenya.

 

“Let’s just say Madobe and I have different values,” Professor Gandhi said from the tearoom of a fancy hotel in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, where he was wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a stylish thick cotton blazer.

 

Professor Gandhi’s and Sheik Madobe’s forces, working simultaneously though not quite together, recently pushed the Shabab out of a few towns along the Kenyan border. The Kenyan military has been backing them up, and according to American diplomatic cables, the Chinese government gave Kenya weapons and uniforms for the Somali militiamen, possibly because there is oil in southern Somalia that the Chinese covet.

 

A similar situation is unfolding near the Ethiopian border, where an Ethiopian-backed militia has defeated Shabab forces and established a narrow zone of control. In central Somalia, another militia, Ahlu Sunna Wal Jama’a, which also receives Ethiopian weapons, has seized several towns from the Shabab as well.

 

The Shabab seem to be undercut by internal fissures, though they still have thousands of fighters. Several leaders, including Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, have recently been killed, and the Shabab’s policy of blocking Western food aid at a time of famine has meant that hundreds of thousands of people have fled their territory, depleting the militants’ resources and depriving them of recruits. Those who remain are often too poor to tax or too sick to soldier.

 

In August, the Shabab announced they were pulling out of Mogadishu for the first time in years, though some fighters apparently stayed behind to terrorize the population and behead more than a dozen people.

 

The new anti-Shabab forces have differing relationships with the transitional government. Sheik Madobe says he is willing to work with transitional leaders; Professor Gandhi dismissed them as a lost cause. But even the local administrations marginally aligned with the government say they do not get much help from Mogadishu and now want to break away.

 

“Separation, that’s our dream,” said Abdirashid Hassan Abdinur, a local official in Dolo, near the Ethiopian border. As for a name, he said they were still working on that. “All I can say is that we’ll pick it here, not at some foreign hotel.”

 

Source: NY Times

[Jiiroow Bakaal]

Dahllinyaradii xaqa idiin keentay waa diideen ka xaaxaabsha marka wwaxey keentay

 

20 sano soo socda saan isu daba orda

[Libaax-Sankataabte]

 

American officials are struggling to keep up with Somalia’s rapidly evolving — or some say devolving — politics, saying they have lost faith in the transitional government’s leaders, especially the president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, and are now open to the idea of financing local security forces.

Interesting

[The Zack]

Somali wax lagu wareero waa tahay. Hadalkaad shalay isku ogeydeen oo gadaal gadaal loo geddiyay bey beri kuula iman. Mareykanku wey yaabeen Sheekh Shariif-na Soomaalida kale waa kasii laba wajiileysan yahay, remember siduu u khayaamay maxkamadihii? Oo haddana u khayaamay Isbaheysigii dib u xoreynta iyo Aweys? Oo haddana u khayaamay Farmaajo?.

[nuune]

^^ In my opinion, Sharif Ahmed needs to do some courses, such as International Relations, or International Politics with language, or similar, when he is talking, one can find so many errors with the way he delivers his speech when with delegates, no pause, no body language, and not even eye contact with the delegates, it is like he is doing Friday Khutba, for mopped sake, he is the President, and needs to improve his English Language(he never spoke a single phrase apart from International Community & IGAD, so was Mohamed Dheere who never stopped saying international comunity even when he is having a dinner)

[Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar]

 

Nuunka, wasiirnimo muu kuu diiday Shariifka waa daba dhigatee.

[Jiiroow Bakaal]

Its getting worse

 

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/new-american-ally-in-somalia-butcher-warlord/

 

New American Ally in Somalia: ‘Butcher’ Warlord

 

If you thought it was bad that Washington is paying a shady French mercenary to do its dirty work in Somalia, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Just wait to you see our latest ally: an admirer of Osama bin Laden with a gory past.

 

Richard Rouget, a notorious gun-for-hire who uses American funds to train African Union soldiers fighting in the ruins of Mogadishu, has been mentioned in connection with at least one murder. But U.S.-backed Somali government general Yusuf Mohamed Siad, a.k.a. “Indha Adde,” a.k.a, “The Butcher,” once ruled an entire region of Somalia with a bloody fist.

 

The U.S.-led international intervention in civil war-torn Somalia is unlike any of America’s other wars. Where the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are fought by tens of thousands of U.S. troops, in Somalia Washington pays others to do most of the fighting. These proxies include merc firms, regional bodies such as the A.U. and local allies including the nascent federal government.

 

That means less direct danger to American lives. But in another sense it means more danger. The more that the U.S. relies on proxy armies to do its fighting, the more it risks those proxies usurping American support and directing it towards their own dubious ends. That’s the subject of ace reporter Jeremy Scahill’s latest piece in The Nation and also of my own feature for The Diplomat.

 

“As one of the main warlords who divided and destroyed Somalia during the civil war that raged through the 1990s, he brutally took control of the Lower Shabelle region,” Scahill wrote about Siad. “There are allegations that he ran drug and weapons trafficking operations from the Merca port.” Siad also readily admits providing protection to al-Qaida operatives and speaks fondly of the late Osama bin Laden.

 

Mind you, this is one of the top generals in the army of one of our closest allies in Somalia.

 

For years, Siad resisted CIA efforts to lure him and his hundreds of militiamen to the American side. It took a lot of sweet-talking plus seismic shifts in Somali politics and U.S. strategy to draw in Siad. In 2008, Washington backed Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a moderate Islamist and former ally of Siad’s, for Somali president. Just two years prior, Ahmed had been co-leader of the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamic group that birthed al-Shabab, pictured, a terrorist and insurgent group and today the main threat in Somalia.

 

Ahmed and Siad both changed sides as Al Shabab grew more extreme and foreign governments organized to destroy it. For the moment, the U.S. and its shady Somali allies share a common enemy. It’s not clear how long the alliance will last — or how strong it is even today. “Ahmed claims that Indha Adde [a.k.a., Siad] and other warlords have sworn allegiance to the government,” Scahill wrote, “but it is abundantly clear from traveling extensively through Mogadishu with Indha Adde that his men are loyal to him above all else.”

 

“The warlords being backed by you [America] have only a conflict of interest with the Shabab, not of ideology,” another former warlord told Scahill. “That’s why [arming and supporting them] is a dangerous game.”

 

With Al Shabab on the run following relentless international attacks from the ground, air and sea, Washington soon could find itself in an uneasy relationship with U.S.-armed Somalis who, just a few years ago, were its enemies — and who no longer have a greater enemy to focus on.

 

What happens after that is anybody’s guess.

[nuune]

Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar;745498 wrote:

 

Nuunka, wasiirnimo muu kuu diiday Shariifka waa daba dhigatee.

isaga maa magacaabo wasiiryaasha horta, mise Gaas, laakin Sakiin ayaa my fav ah laakin waa nin sixirka isticmaalo ayaan maqley oo faalkuu ku dheereeyaa

[Allamagan]

Sharifataynku waa faashadaan ka hor inta aysan guriga subixii ka bixin ayaa la yiri...

[Jacaylbaro]

Indeed ......

[Nabad_dadaye]

game ka soomaaliya ka socdo waxaa gacanta ku haya dad aan soomaali ahayn , soomaalida dhanka loo jeediyo ayey isaga jeedsadaan .

hogaamiya kooxeedyadii hore shacabka wey naceen balse waxaa is weydiin mudan yaa taageerayay oo hubka ukeeni jiray .

 

maxkamadihii markey qabsadeen xamar iyo agagaarkeeda sowma fiicneyn in lala heshiiyo maadaama ninkii ugu sareeyay iyo kuwa tira badan oo madax ka ahaa eey hada TFG ka tirsan yihiin , maxaa loo burburiyay barnaamijkoodii , bal aan isweydiino .

mareykanka wuu ka war qabay in alshabab iyo inta eey isku fikirka yihiin eey maxaakimta ku jireen , burburintaana iney ka dhalaneyso waxyaala sidaan oo kale wuu sugayay mareykanka . ethiopia ayey usoo hubeysay ayadoo la ogyahay sida ey soomalida u nacebtahay amxaarta ,taasna wexey dhiiri galisay in dad badan ey shabab ku biiraan .

 

laakin waxaa yaableh muxuu mareykanku ubuunbuuniyay alshabab ,iney taageera helaana uu u fududeeyay kadib markuu xabashi gala yiri wadanka . shalayna hogaamiya kooxeedyadana xabashi ayaa taageereysaye . .

 

 

waanka niyad jabnay TFG ayey hadana la imaadeen ,oo hogaamiya kooxeed ayey soo celin rabaan .

hogaamiye kooxeed ayey taageereen ,shacabkaa iska qabtay , alshabab iney xoogeystaan ayey fududeeyeen , TFG ayey soo taageereen dhanka kale waa leyska horkeenay ,si fiicanna meey u taageerin dowlada , dowlada in hogaamiye lagu celiyo ayey soo wadaan ,so koobaabin inaan ku warwareegano ayaa larabay oo sidii kubada loogu cayaro soomaliya waana dhacday .

goormaan ka bixi doodaa sidaan aan hada nahay maxaana markii hore noo sabababy inaan sidaa noqono , waa suaal taagan?