Rights group Assails West over Somalia failure

The United States and other Western powers have "exacerbated Somalia's downward spiral" and must revise their policies in the east African country, a Human Rights Watch report has warned.

The report, released Monday, blames the policies under President George W. Bush for "breeding the very extremism that it is supposed to defeat."

"The new administration of U.S. President Barack Obama should urgently review U.S. policy in Somalia and the broader Horn of Africa and break with the failed approach of his predecessor," the report said.

It also cites key European governments for failing "to address the human rights dimensions of the crisis, with many officials hoping that somehow unfettered support to abusive TFG (Somali transitional government) forces will improve stability."

Somalia's weak transitional government, backed by Ethiopian forces, continues to battle Islamic militias with the fighting concentrated in the capital, Mogadishu. Ethiopian forces have not withdrawn from the country, as required under a recent cease-fire agreement.

Ethiopia invaded Somalia two years ago and successfully routed the Islamic militia that seized control of the capital. The HRW report states that the United States "directly backed Ethiopia's intervention."

Since the 2006 overthrow of the Islamic Courts Union, Somalia has suffered from "unconstrained warfare and violent rights abuses" by all warring parties.

"All sides have used indiscriminate force as a matter of routine, and in 2008 violence has taken on a new dimension with the targeted murders of aid workers and civil society activists," the report states.

"The human rights and humanitarian catastrophe facing Somalia today threatens the lives and livelihoods of millions of Somalis on a scale not witnessed since the early 1990s."

Heavy fighting in Mogadishu and across Somalia has driven more than a million people from their homes. The lawlessness has also spilled onto the seas off the Horn of Africa, where international vessels are routinely hijacked by suspected Somali pirates who demand large ransoms.

Human Rights Watch offers specific recommendations to the Somali and Ethiopian governments, the main militias, and the international community to address the human rights abuses.

It calls on the West to "insist upon an end to the impunity that has fueled the worst abuses - and the right place to start is by moving the U.N. Security Council to establish a Commission of Inquiry to document abuses and lay the groundwork for accountability."

Somalia: Another CIA-backed coup blows up

By Mike Whitney

Global Research, December 2, 2008

"The Ethiopian invasion, which was sanctioned by the US government, has destroyed virtually all the life-sustaining economic systems which the population has built for the last fifteen years." Abdi Samatar, professor of Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, Democracy Now

Up until a month ago, no one in the Bush administration showed the least bit of interest in the incidents of piracy off the coast of Somalia. Now that's all changed and there's talk of sending in the Navy to patrol the waters off the Horn of Africa and clean up the pirates hideouts. Why the sudden about-face? Could it have something to do with the fact that the Ethiopian army is planning to withdrawal all of its troops from Mogadishu by the end of the year, thus, ending the failed two year US-backed occupation of Somalia?

The United States has lost the ground war in Somalia, but that doesn't mean its geopolitical objectives have changed one iota. The US intends to stay in the region for years to come and use its naval power to control the critical shipping lanes from the Gulf of Aden. The growing strength of the Somali national resistance is a set-back, but it doesn't change the basic game-plan. The pirates are actually a blessing in disguise. They provide an excuse for the administration to beef up it's military presence and put down roots. Every crisis is an opportunity.

There's an interesting subtext to the pirate story that hasn't appeared in the western media. According to Simon Assaf of the Socialist Worker:

"Many European, US and Asian shipping firms – notably Switzerland's Achair Partners and Italy's Progresso – signed dumping deals in the early 1990s with Somalia's politicians and militia leaders. This meant they could use the coast as a toxic dumping ground. This practice became widespread as the country descended into civil war. Nick Nuttall of the UN Environment Programme said, "European companies found it was very cheap to get rid of the waste."

When the Asian tsunami of Christmas 2005 washed ashore on the east coast of Africa, it uncovered a great scandal. Tons of radioactive waste and toxic chemicals drifted onto the beaches after the giant wave dislodged them from the sea bed off Somalia. Tens of thousands of Somalis fell ill after coming into contact with this cocktail. They complained to the United Nations (UN), which began an investigation.

"There are reports from villagers of a wide range of medical problems such as mouth bleeds, abdominal hemorrhages, unusual skin disorders and breathing difficulties," the UN noted.

Some 300 people are believed to have died from the poisonous chemicals.

In 2006 Somali fishermen complained to the UN that foreign fishing fleets were using the breakdown of the state to plunder their fish stocks. These foreign fleets often recruited Somali militias to intimidate local fishermen. Despite repeated requests, the UN refused to act. Meanwhile the warships of global powers that patrol the strategically important Gulf of Aden did not sink or seize any vessels dumping toxic chemicals off the coast.

So angry Somalis, whose waters were being poisoned and whose livelihoods were threatened, took matters into their own hands. Fishermen began to arm themselves and attempted to act as unofficial coastguards." (Socialist Worker)

The origins of piracy in Somalia is considerably different than the narrative in the media which tends to perpetuate stereotypes of scary black men who are naturally inclined to criminal behavior. In reality, the pirates were the victims of a US-EU run system that still uses the developing world as a dumping ground for toxic waste regardless of the suffering it causes. (just ask Larry Summers) In fact, the dumping continues to this day, even though we have been assured that we're living in a "post racial era" following the election of Barak Obama. Unfortunately, that rule doesn't apply to the many black and brown people who still find themselves caught in the imperial crosshairs. Their lives are just as miserable as ever.

ETHIOPIA'S PLAN FOR WITHDRAWAL

In 2006, the Bush administration supported an alliance of Somali warlords known as the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) that established a base of operations in the western city of Baidoa. With the help of the Ethiopian army, western mercenaries, US Navy warships, and AC-130 gunships; the TFG captured Mogadishu and forced the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) to retreat to the south. Since then the resistance has coalesced into a tenacious guerrilla army that has recaptured most of the country.

The Bush administration invoked the war on terror to justify its involvement in Somalia, but their case was weak and full of inconsistencies. The ICU is not an Al Qaida affiliate or a terrorist organization despite the claims of the State Department. In fact, the ICU brought a high level of peace and stability to Somalia that hadn't been seen for more than sixteen years.

Political analyst James Petras summed it up like this:

“The ICU was a relatively honest administration, which ended warlord corruption and extortion. Personal safety and property were protected, ending arbitrary seizures and kidnappings by warlords and their armed thugs. The ICU is a broad multi-tendency movement that includes moderates and radical Islamists, civilian politicians and armed fighters, liberals and populists, electoralists and authoritarians. Most important, the Courts succeeded in unifying the country and creating some semblance of nationhood, overcoming clan fragmentation.”

The Bush administration is mainly interested in oil and geopolitics. According to most estimates 30 per cent of America's oil will come from Africa within the next ten years. That means the Pentagon will have to extend its tentacles across the continent. Washington's allies in the TFG promised to pass oil laws that would allow foreign oil companies to return to Somalia, but now all of that is uncertain. It is impossible to know what type of government will emerge from the present conflict. Many pundits expect Somalia to descend into terrorist-breeding, failed state for years to come.

The latest round of fighting has created a humanitarian disaster. 1.3 million people have been forced from their homes with nothing more than what they can carry on their backs. Over 3.5 million people are now huddled in tent cities in the south with little food, clean water or medical supplies.

According to the UN News Center: "Nearly half the population is in crisis or need of assistance....Continuing instability, coupled with drought, high food prices and the collapse of the local currency have only worsened the dire humanitarian situation in recent months. The UN estimates that 40 per cent of the population, are in need of assistance. In addition, one in six children under the age of five in southern and central Somalia is currently acutely malnourished." (UN News Center)

The war between the occupying Ethiopian army and the various guerrilla factions has steadily intensified over the last two years. Fighters from the ICU, Al-Shabaab and other Islamic groups have moved from the south to the vicinity of Mogadishu where fighting could break out at any time. It's "game-over" for Bush's proxy army and the transitional federal government. They cannot win, which is why the Ethiopian leaders announced a complete withdrawal of troops by the end of the year. By January 1, 2009, the occupation will be over.

In a recent Chicago Tribune article, "US Appears to be Losing in Somalia", journalist Paul Salopek sums it up like this:

"(Somalia) is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants...and secretly imprison them offshore, aboard U.S. warships. The British civil-rights group Reprieve contended that as many as 17 U.S. warships may have doubled as floating prisons since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks...

"Somalia is one of the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11," said Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College in North Carolina. "By any rational metric, what we've ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted." (Paul Salopek, "US Appears to be Losing in Somalia" Chicago Tribune)

The CIA has done its job well. It's created a beehive for terrorism and the potential for another catastrophe like 9-11.

Currently, negotiations are underway between the guerrilla leaders and the TFG over a power-sharing agreement. But no one expects the talks will amount to anything. The moderate ICU may regain power but the country will still be ungovernable for years to come. At best, Somalia is a decade away from restoring the fragile peace that was in place before Bush's bloody intervention.

America's Hidden War in Somalia

"Nobody is Watching"

By Paul Salopek

Global Research, November 26, 2008


BERBERA, Somalia - To glimpse America's secret war in Africa, you must bang with a rock on the iron gate of the prison in this remote port in northern Somalia. A sleepy guard will yank open a rusty deadbolt. Then, you ask to speak to an inmate named Mohamed Ali Isse.

Isse, 36, is a convicted murderer and jihadist. He is known among his fellow prisoners, with grudging awe, as "The Man with the American Thing in His Leg."

That "thing" is a stainless steel surgical pin screwed into his bullet-shattered femur, courtesy, he says, of the U.S. Navy. How it got there — or more to the point, how Isse ended up in this crumbling, stone-walled hellhole at the uttermost end of the Earth—is a story that the U.S. government probably would prefer to remain untold.

That's because Isse and his fancy surgery scars offer what little tangible evidence exists of a bare-knuckled war that has been waged silently, over the past five years, with the sole aim of preventing anarchic Somalia from becoming the world's next Afghanistan.

It is a standoff war in which the Pentagon lobs million-dollar cruise missiles into a famine-haunted African wasteland the size of Texas, hoping to kill lone terror suspects who might be dozing in candlelit huts. (The raids' success or failure is almost impossible to verify.)

It is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants and—according to Isse and civil rights activists—secretly imprison them offshore, aboard U.S. warships.

Mostly, though, it is a policy time bomb that will be inherited by the incoming Obama administration: a little-known front in the global war on terrorism that Washington appears to be losing, if it hasn't already been lost.

"Somalia is one of the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11," said Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College in North Carolina. "By any rational metric, what we've ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted."

What the Bush administration wanted, when it tacitly backed Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in late 2006, was clear enough: to help a close African ally in the war on terror crush the Islamic Courts Union, or ICU. The Taliban-like movement emerged from the ashes of more than 15 years of anarchy and lawlessness in Africa's most infamous failed state, Somalia.

At first, the invasion seemed an easy victory. By early 2007, the ICU had been routed, a pro-Western transitional government installed, and hundreds of Islamic militants in Somalia either captured or killed.

But over the last 18 months, Somalia's Islamists—now more radical than ever—have regrouped and roared back.

On a single day last month, they flexed their muscles by killing nearly 30 people in a spate of bloody car-bomb attacks that recalled the darkest days of Iraq. And their brutal militia, the Shabab or "Youth," today controls much of the destitute nation, a shattered but strategic country that overlooks the vital oil-shipping lanes of the Gulf of Aden.

Even worse, in recent days Shabab's fighters have moved to within miles of the Somalian capital of Mogadishu, threatening to topple the weak interim government supported by the U.S. and Ethiopia.

At the same time, according to the UN, the explosion of violence is inflaming what probably is the worst humanitarian tragedy in the world.

In the midst of a killing drought, more than 700,000 city dwellers have been driven out of bullet-scarred Mogadishu by the recent clashes between the Islamist rebels and the interim government.

The U.S. role in Somalia's current agonies has not always been clear. But back in the Berbera prison, Isse, who is both a villain and a victim in this immense panorama of suffering, offered a keyhole view that extended all the way back to Washington.

Wrapped in a faded sarong, scowling in the blistering-hot prison yard, the jihadist at first refused to meet foreign visitors—a loathed American in particular. But after some cajoling, he agreed to tell his story through a fellow inmate: a surreal but credible tale of illicit abduction by the CIA, secret helicopter rides and a journey through an African gulag that lifts the curtain, albeit only briefly, on an American invisible war.

"Your government gets away with a lot here," said the warden, Hassan Mohamed Ibrahim, striding about his antique facility with a pistol tucked in the back of his pants. "In Iraq, the world is watching. In Afghanistan, the world is watching. In Somalia, nobody is watching."

From ashes of 'Black Hawk Down'

In truth, merely watching in Mogadishu these days is apt to get you killed.

Somalia's hapless capital has long been considered the Dodge City of Africa—a seaside metropolis sundered by clan fighting ever since the nation's central government collapsed in 1991. That feral reputation was cemented in 1993, when chanting mobs dragged the bodies of U.S. Army Rangers through the streets in a disastrous UN peacekeeping mission chronicled in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down."

Yet if Mogadishu was once merely a perilous destination for outsiders, visiting today is suicidal.

For the first time in local memory, the airport—the city's frail lifeline to the world—is regularly closed by insurgent mortar attacks despite a small and jittery contingent of African Union peacekeepers.

Foreign workers who once toiled quietly for years in Somalia have been evacuated. A U.S. missile strike in May killed the Shabab commander, Aden Hashi Ayro, enraging Islamist militants who have since vowed to kidnap and kill any outsider found in the country.

The upshot: Most of Somalia today is closed to the world.

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way when Washington provided satellite intelligence to the invading Ethiopians two years ago.

The homegrown Islamic radicals who controlled most of central and southern Somalia in mid-2006 certainly were no angels. They shuttered Mogadishu's cinemas, demanded that Somali men grow beards and, according to the U.S. State Department, provided refuge to some 30 local and international jihadists associated with Al Qaeda.

But the Islamic Courts Union's turbaned militiamen had actually defeated Somalia's hated warlords. And their enforcement of Islamic religious laws, while unpopular among many Somalis, made Mogadishu safe to walk in for the first time in a generation.

"It's not just that people miss those days," said a Somali humanitarian worker who, for safety reasons, asked to be identified only as Hassan. "They resent the Ethiopians and Americans tearing it all up, using Somalia as their battlefield against global terrorism. It's like the Cold War all over again. Somalis aren't in control."

When the Islamic movement arose, Isse, the terrorist jailed in Berbera, was a pharmacy owner from the isolated town of Buro in Somaliland, a parched northern enclave that declared independence from Somalia in the early 1990s.

Radicalized by U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is serving a life sentence for organizing the killings of four foreign aid workers in late 2003 and early 2004. Two of his victims were elderly British teachers. A dour, bearded man with bullet scars puckering his neck and leg, Isse still maintains his innocence.

Much of Isse's account of his capture and imprisonment was independently corroborated by Western intelligence analysts, Somali security officials and court records in Somaliland, where the wounded jihadist was tried and jailed for murdering the aid workers. Those sources say Isse was snatched by the U.S. after fleeing to the safe house of a notorious Islamist militant in Mogadishu.

How that operation unfolded on a hot June night in 2004 reveals the extent of American clandestine involvement in Somalia's chaotic affairs—and how such anti-terrorism efforts appear to have backfired.

Interrogation aboard ship

"I captured Isse for the Americans," said Mohamed Afrah Qanyare. "The Americans contracted us to do certain things, and we did them. Isse put up resistance so we shot him. But he survived."

A scar-faced warlord in a business suit, Qanyare is a member of Somalia's weak transitional government. Today he divides his days between lawless Mogadishu and luxury hotels in Nairobi.

But four years ago, his militia helped form the kernel of a CIA-created mercenary force called the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism in Somalia. The unit cobbled together some of the world's most violent, wily and unreliable clan militias—including gangs that had attacked U.S. forces in the early 1990s—to confront a rising tide of Islamic militancy in Somalia's anarchic capital.

The Somalis on the CIA payroll engaged in a grim tit-for-tat exchange of kidnappings and assassinations with extremists. And Isse was one of their catches.

He was wounded in a CIA-ordered raid on his Mogadishu safe house in June 2004, according to Qanyare and Matt Bryden, one of the world's leading scholars of the Somali insurgency who has access to intelligence regarding it. They say Isse was then loaded aboard a U.S. military helicopter summoned by satellite phone and was flown, bleeding, to an offshore U.S. vessel.

"He saw white people in uniforms working on his body," said Isse's Somali defense lawyer, Bashir Hussein Abdi, describing how Isse was rushed into a ship-board operating room. "He felt the ship moving. He thought he was dreaming."

Navy doctors spliced a steel rod into Isse's bullet-shattered leg, according to Abdi. Every day for about a month afterward, Isse's court depositions assert, plainclothes U.S. agents grilled the bedridden Somali at sea about Al Qaeda's presence.

The CIA has never publicly acknowledged its operations in Somalia. Agency spokesman George Little declined to comment on Isse's case.

For years, human-rights organizations attempted to expose the rumored detention and interrogation of terror suspects aboard U.S. warships to avoid media and legal scrutiny. In June, the British civil rights group Reprieve contended that as many as 17 U.S. warships may have doubled as "floating prisons" since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Calling such claims "misleading," the Pentagon has insisted that U.S. ships have served only as transit stops for terror suspects being shuttled to permanent detention camps such as the one in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But Tribune reporting on Isse indicates strongly that a U.S. warship was used for interrogation at least once off the lawless coast of Somalia.

The U.S. Navy conceded Isse had stayed aboard one of its vessels. In a terse statement, Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet that patrols the Gulf of Aden, said only that the Navy was "not able to confirm dates" of Isse's imprisonment.

For reasons that remain unclear, he was later flown to Camp Lemonier, a U.S. military base in the African state of Djibouti, Somali intelligence sources say, and from there to a clandestine prison in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Isse and his lawyer allege he was detained there for six weeks and tortured by Ethiopian military intelligence with electric shocks.

Ethiopia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and office of prime minister did not respond to queries about Isse's allegations.

However, security officials in neighboring Somaliland did confirm that they collected Isse from the Ethiopian police at a dusty border crossing in late 2004. "The Man with the American Thing in His Leg" was interrogated again. After a local trial, he was locked in the ancient Berbera prison.

"It doesn't matter if he is guilty or innocent," said Abdi, the defense lawyer. "Countries like Ethiopia and America use terrorism to justify this treatment. This is not justice. It is a crime in itself."

Tales of CIA "snatch and grab" operations against terror suspects abroad aren't new, of course. President George W. Bush finally confirmed two years ago the existence of an international program that "renditioned" terrorism suspects to a network of "black site" prisons in Eastern Europe, Iraq and Afghanistan.

As for the CIA's anti-terror mercenaries in Mogadishu, they may have kidnapped a dozen or more wanted Islamists for the Americans, intelligence experts say. But their excesses ended up swelling the ranks of their enemy, the Islamic Courts Union militias.

"It was a stupid idea," said Bryden, the security analyst who has written extensively on Somalia's Islamist insurgency. "It actually strengthened the hand of the Islamists and helped trigger the crisis we're in today."

In the sweltering Berbera prison, Exhibit A in Washington's phantom war in Somalia had finished his afternoon prayers. He clapped his sandals together, then limped off to his cell without a word.

A sinking nation

The future of Somalia and its 8 million people is totally unscripted. This unbearable lack of certainty, of a way forward, accommodates little hope.

Ethiopian and U.S. actions have eroded Somalis' hidebound allegiance to their clans, once a firewall against Al Qaeda's global ideology, says Bryden. Somalia's 2 million-strong diaspora is of greatest concern. Angry young men, foreign passports in hand, could be lured back to the reopened Shabab training camps, where instructors occasionally use photocopied portraits of Bush as rifle targets.

Some envision no Somalia at all.

With about $8 billion in humanitarian aid fire-hosed into the smoking ruins of Somalia since the early 1990s—the U.S. will donate roughly $200 million this year alone—a growing chorus of policymakers is advocating that the failed state be allowed to fail, to break up into autonomous zones or fiefdoms, such as Isse's home of Somaliland.

But there is another possible future for Somalia. To see it, you must go to Bosaso, a port 300 miles east of Isse's cell.

Bosaso is an escape hatch from Somalia. Thousands of people swarm through the town's scruffy waterfront every year, seeking passage across the Gulf of Aden to the Middle East. Dressed in rags, they sleep by the hundreds in dirt alleys and empty lots. Stranded women and girls are forced into prostitution.

"You can see why we still need America's help," said Abdinur Jama, the coast guard commander for Puntland, the semiautonomous state encompassing Bosaso. "We need training and equipment to stop this."

Dapper in camouflage and a Yankees cap, Jama was a rarity in Somalia, an optimist. While Bosaso's teenagers shook their fists at high-flying U.S. jets on routine patrols—"Go to hell!" they chanted—Jama still spoke well of international engagement in Somalia.

On a morning when he offered to take visitors on a coast patrol, it did not seem kind to tell him what a U.S. military think tank at West Point had concluded about Somalia last year: that, in some respects, failed states were admirable places to combat Al Qaeda, because the absence of local sovereignty permitted "relatively unrestricted Western counterterrorism efforts."

After all, Jama's decrepit patrol boat was sinking.

A crew member scrambled to stanch a yard-high geyser of seawater that spurted through the cracked hull. Jama screwed his cap on tighter and peered professionally at land that, despite Washington's best-laid plans, has turned far more desperate than Afghanistan.

"Can you swim?" Jama asked. But it hardly seemed to matter. Back on dry land, in Somalia, an entire country was drowning.

psalopek@tribune.com
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Pirate Update

The Associated Press
updated 7:33 a.m. ET, Tues., Dec. 2, 2008

Pirates open fire on U.S. cruise liner
Pirates near Somalia chased and shot at a U.S. cruise liner with more than 1,000 people on board but failed to hijack the vessel, a maritime official said Tuesday.

The liner, carrying 656 international passengers and 399 crew members, was sailing in the Gulf of Aden on Sunday when it encountered six pirates in two speedboats, said Noel Choong who heads the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting center in Malaysia.

The pirates fired at the passenger liner but the larger boat was faster than the pirates' vessels, Choong said.

"It is very fortunate that the liner managed to escape," he said, urging all ships to remain vigilant in the area.

The ship's owner, Oceania Cruises Inc., identified the vessel as the M/S Nautica.

In a statement on its Web site, the company said pirates fired eight rifle shots at the liner as it sailed along a maritime corridor patrolled by an international naval coalition, but that the ship's captain increased speed and managed to outrun the skiffs. All passengers and crew are safe and there was no damage to the vessel, it said.

The Nautica was on a 32-day cruise from Rome to Singapore, with stops at ports in Italy, Egypt, Oman, Dubai, India, Malaysia and Thailand, the Web site said. Based on that schedule, the liner was headed from Egypt to Oman when it was attacked.

The liner arrived in the southern Oman port city of Salalah on Monday morning, and the passengers toured the city before leaving for the capital, Muscat, Monday evening, an official of the Oman Tourism Ministry said Tuesday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain, said it was aware of the failed hijacking but did not have further details.

International warships patrol the area and have created a security corridor in the pirate-infested waters under a U.S.-led initiative, but the attacks have not abated.

In about 100 attacks on ships off the Somali coast this year, 40 vessels have been hijacked, Choong said. Fourteen remain in the hands of pirates along with more than 250 crew members.

In two if the most daring attacks, pirates seized a Ukrainian freighter loaded with 33 battle tanks in September, and on Nov. 15, a Saudi oil tanker carrying $100 million worth of crude oil.

Ransom agreed for freighter?
Ukraine's Foreign Ministry spokesman Vasyl Kyrylych said Monday that negotiations with Somali pirates holding the cargo ship MV Faina are nearly completed, the Interfax news agency reported.

A spokesman for the Faina's owner said Sunday that the Somali pirates had agreed on a ransom for the ship and it could be released within days.

Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991, and pirates have taken advantage of the country's lawlessness to launch attacks on foreign shipping from the Somali coast. Around 100 ships have been attacked so far this year.

'Disorder'
Somali prime minister Nur Hassan Hussein said Tuesday that his country has been torn apart by 18 years of civil war and cannot stop piracy alone.

"The piracy problem is part of the legacy of the situation of the country. This 18 years of civil war is followed by disorder," Hussein told The Associated Press in an interview in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.

Stopping piracy is "not something Somalia can do alone. This needs a tremendous effort," he said.

Hussein has appealed for international troops, as his government's Ethiopian allies have said they would pull out their forces by the end of the year.

The Ethiopians are all that has stood between the shaky administration and Islamic insurgents who have seized control of all of southern Somalia except for the capital and the parliamentary seat of Baidoa.

Oops

Score one for the Somali Pirates. It seems the pirate mothership sunk by the Indian navy wasn't a pirate mothership afterall. It was a Thai fishing trawler.

Government near to collapse, says Somalia leader

guardian.co.uk, Monday November 17 2008 00.01 GMT

President Abdullahi Yusuf of Somalia has admitted that his government is on the verge of collapse and that Islamist groups now control most of the country.

In a speech to Somali MPs gathered in the Kenyan capital Nairobi at the weekend, Yusuf said that the government only had a presence in the capital Mogadishu and in Baidoa, "and people are being killed there every day. Islamists have taken over everywhere else."

His frank admission confirms what is known but seldom publicly acknowledged by those with a stake in Somalia's future, from Ethiopia, whose continued occupation unites the different Islamist groups against a common enemy, to the UN and western countries, which have backed the warlord-heavy government for years.

The latest bout of infighting - Yusuf and his prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, have failed to agree a new cabinet despite a deadline from regional leaders - came as Islamist militias made rapid gains towards Mogadishu. Al-Shabaab, the most extreme and effective of the Islamist insurgent groups, took control of Elasha, nine miles from the capital, on Saturday. Al-Shabaab fighters had already captured the strategic ports towns of Merka and Barawe without firing a shot.

Though they already control many of Mogadishu's battered suburbs, a heavy Ethiopian presence is likely to stop al-Shabaab taking over the entire city. But if the government does collapse, the mission of the 3,000 African Union peacekeepers and Ethiopian troops will be redundant with no state institutions to protect. It was a point stressed by Yusuf, who urged MPs to return to Baidoa, the provisional capital, and form a new government as soon as possible, warning that it would otherwise be "every man for himself" .

"The Islamists kill city cleaners, they will not spare legislators," he said.

While atrocities by all sides have claimed thousands of lives this year alone, al-Shabaab fighters have increasingly been targeting civilians. Accused by the US of links to al-Qaida, they have adopted similar tactics. Last month five synchronised suicide bombings in autonomous Somaliland and Puntland claimed 25 lives.

The Shabaab have also employed brutal tactics to enforce their version of sharia law in some areas under their control. In Kismayo, a young woman was stoned to death for alleged adultery last month, while 32 people taking part in traditional dancing in Balad were flogged on Saturday.

Such punishments are unpopular among ordinary among Somalis who have traditionally practised a moderate form of Islam. But, as happened two years ago when the Islamic Courts Union wrested control of Mogadishu from warlord rule, they have usually welcomed the restoration of security - a precious commodity in a country that has known only anarchy for 17 years.

The difference between 2006 and today is that the Islamist struggle has many different strands, which makes the outcome more dangerous, according to Bruno Schiemsky, a former chairman of the UN monitoring group investigating arms embargo violations in Somalia.

Apart from al-Shabaab, the Jabhad al-Islamiya movement, believed to be associated with the cleric Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, and the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia, led by Sheik Sharif Ahmed, also control territory. The two groups' ideology is more nationalist than al-Shabaab, said Schiemsky.

"For now the three groups are united against the common enemy of Ethiopia, but when Ethiopia withdraws there will be complete fragmentation and chaos. The nightmare in Somalia is still to come."

A diplomat in Nairobi said that western governments, including his own, had been guilty of viewing Somalia as "too difficult too solve and not important enough to matter". But the failure of Yusuf's government meant fresh thinking was required on what type of authority in Somalia was acceptable to the international community.

"I don't believe that Somalia will become a Taliban-style state. We need to accept a few years of harsh Islamic rule and work with the authority that way."

Islamists take Merka

November 13, 2008

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
New York Times

NAIROBI, Kenya — A Somali official appealed for urgent help Wednesday as residents reported that the key port city of Merka had fallen to Islamist insurgents.

Hundreds of fighters rolled into the port in heavily-armed pickup trucks, meeting no resistance because government-allied militias had fled the night before, according to residents. Merka is only 60 miles south of Mogadishu, Somalia’s bullet-pocked capital, and Somali officials said the Islamists were now planning to lay siege to Mogadishu.

“We know their grand plan,” said Abdi Awaleh Jama, an ambassador at large for the transitional federal government. “But we’re not going to run away. We’re going to fight with whatever we have.” But, he added, “We need help _ urgently.”

The Islamists have been steadily gobbling up territory — Merka, Kismayu, Dhusamare and Qoryooley — and now control most of the country.

They seem to be fast approaching Mogadishu, from the north and the south. In some areas, they have begun imposing a strict interpretation of Islamic law, even recently stoning to death a young woman who said she was raped. The Islamists convicted her of adultery. United Nations officials said she may have been as young as 13.

In Mogadishu, the transitional government seems to be embroiled in another round of infighting. Officials allied with the president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, are accusing the prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, of secretly helping the Islamists. Some of the president’s men have even gone as far to say that Ethiopian forces, who have been in Somalia for almost two years helping to prop up the government, are now working with the insurgents.

At the same time, Ethiopian officials are blaming Somalia’s leaders for not making peace with Islamist clerics, who enjoy a large degree of popular support. The Ethiopians have indicated they will withdraw their troops soon, which many Somalis believe will spell the end of the government.

“Yes, it’s bad,” Mr. Abdi said about the fall of Merka and the overall status of the government. “These Islamists are terrorists. The American Congress and administration have to wake up. We have a common interest in defeating them.”

Complicating matters is the fact that Merka was home to a major United Nations operation to bring in desperately needed food. Somalia has been teetering on the edge of a famine for much of the past year, because of drought, conflict-related displacement and high global food prices. Millions of people need emergency rations to survive.

United Nations officials said Wednesday they did not know how the capture of Merka would affect their operations.

Suicide Bombers Rock Somaliland

Filed at 7:46 a.m. ET

HARGEISA, Somalia (Reuters) - A wave of suicide bombings killed at least 28 people across northern Somalia on Wednesday in attacks that snatched attention from political crisis talks taking place in neighboring Kenya.

The five synchronized blasts killed some 25 people in Hargeisa and another three in Bosasso.

No group immediately claimed responsibility. But in recent months, Islamist insurgents fighting Somalia's Western-backed interim government and its Ethiopian allies have launched attacks to coincide with international efforts to end turmoil in the lawless Horn of Africa nation.

The bombers hit as leaders of the interim government met regional heads of state for talks in Nairobi. The four-year-old administration is under pressure to solve the chaos and share some power with moderate opposition figures.

Washington, and its closest ally in the region Ethiopia, say Somalia's Islamists are linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda.

"It is the work of the usual terrorists who try to create instability. I assure you they will not be left to get away with it. They will be brought to justice," Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin told reporters at the meeting.

In Hargeisa, in the breakaway Somaliland region, witnesses said three bombers attacked the president's office, a U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) compound and the Ethiopian embassy.

Journalist Ali Jama Mohamed was walking past the presidency when a car crashed into its doors.

"There was a big explosion and I saw many people, mostly pedestrians and some security guards, thrown to the floor. Some were dead and others wounded," Mohamed told Reuters.

Witnesses said three people were killed at the presidency, while at least 20 died at the shattered Ethiopian mission. Two people were killed at the UNDP building.

"BLOWN TO PIECES"

In Bosasso, in neighboring semi-autonomous Puntland, two suicide bombers detonated explosives-laden cars inside the Intelligence Service compound, killing two soldiers and a woman and wounding several other people.

"The two cars and their drivers were blown to pieces," Muse Gelle, the governor of Bari region, told Reuters. "It is too early to know all the casualties. Tensions are high and Puntland soldiers have surrounded all government institutions."

Puntland and Somaliland had been relatively quiet compared to southern Somalia, where the government and its Ethiopian military allies have been battling rebels waging a campaign of roadside bombs, artillery strikes and assassinations.

The violence has killed nearly 10,000 civilians and an unknown number of combatants since the start of last year. More than a million people have been driven from their homes.

The rebels have previously launched big attacks during mediation efforts in a move analysts say is calculated to show the interim administration who is in control on the ground.

When government officials and some opposition figures signed a peace pact at U.N.-led negotiations in Djibouti in August, hardline al Shabaab insurgents seized the strategic southern port of Kismayu in fighting that killed at least 70 people.

The Shabaab have since consolidated their control of the area, and on Monday they stoned to death a 23-year-old woman accused of adultery -- the first such public killing by the Islamists for about two years.

(Additional reporting by Abdiqani Hassan in Bosasso and Guled Mohamed in Nairobi; Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Jon Boyle)

Why We Don't Hear About the Conflict in the Ogaden

In recent months, reports have begun to spill out of Ethiopia detailing human rights abuses and misuse of food aid in its eastern Ogaden region. Human Rights Watch issued a report urging Ethiopia to stop "abuses [that] violate the laws of war."

The U.S. government considers Ethiopia an important ally in the war on terror, since it shares borders with Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia, the latter invaded by Ethiopia this past Christmas with Washington's approval. Ethiopia has not been able to extricate itself from Somalia, and the military has been accused of possible war crimes there. Mogadishu even has a new nickname: "Baghdad on the Sea."

Read the article in Slate.

Somali clan elder shot dead

A Somali clan leader and key player in efforts to bring reconciliation to the country's warring factions has been assassinated in Mogadishu.

Maalim Harun Maalim Yusuf was shot twice in the head by three men armed with pistols outside his house on Saturday, according to Madina Guled Mahamed, his wife.

"One of the bullets penetrated through his head," she said. "He was shot as he knocked on the gate. We don't know why they killed him, he was a delegate at the peace talks."

He was a negotiator for a sub-clan of the Abgal clan at a government-backed reconciliation summit that began last month.

Yusuf was from the same sub-clan as Ali Mohamed Gedi, the Somali prime minister.

Delegates at the talks said he had been playing a crucial role.

"Maalim Yusuf was a peace-loving elder. We will badly miss him. His death will negatively impact the talks," Abdirahman Ahmed, one of the delegates, told Reuters. "This is a big blow to peace."

Haji Abdi Iman, the senior delegate for the Hawiye clan, said: "I don't care who committed this heinous crime but I can say this is a black day for the supporters of peace because he a dedicated negotiator despite his old age."

Local residents have said that this was the first time a senior clan elder had been killed in living memory.

The capital had experienced a short period of relative calm after a security crackdown coinciding with the July 15 opening of the talks.

Heavy fighting had erupted in Mogadishu's neighbouring Horuwa district hours after Yusuf was killed.

Mortars were fired at police who had taken up positions near a children's hospital.

"Two guards and a man were wounded after mortars landed at the hospital. The insurgents attacked the police from two sides and we were caught in the middle," a security guard said.

"The police responded with heavy artillery - it was really terrifying."

The Other Failed Invasion

This article on Somalia from the current issue of THE NEW REPUBLIC. The excerpt is beyond fair use, but what the hell. What I find curious here is the repeated assertion that al Qaeda was behind the 1993 "Blackhawk Down" episode. I still find that claim to be dubious, as if the wretched Somalis could not have possibly shot down the helicopters themselves. Likewise, the mayhem in Iraq is being officially attributed to al Qaeda, when clearly much of it is locally generated.



The Other Failed Invasion
Occupational Hazard
by Eliza Griswold
Post date: 08.01.07


Take off your veil!" the Somali soldier shouted at the woman in the mostly empty street. Steadying his assault rifle with his right hand, he ripped away the woman's black niqab with his left. "Why are you coming so close to us? You have explosives?" He leveled the muzzle of his gun against the bridge of her nose. Her mouth, suddenly embarrassed and exposed, broke into a jester's forced grin.

Photo Courtesy Clockwise from top: Shabelle Media, Nasser Nuri, Reuters TV, Reuters/Newscom; Photo illustration by Anastasia Vasilakis"I just want a juice," she pleaded. Except for a handful of armed soldiers, the only other person on the deserted street was a man selling mango juice from behind a table. (A few weeks earlier, the stall he had operated for 14 years had been blown up.) The woman held up her empty palms and backed away. The soldiers let her be and hustled back to their waiting Jeep.

We were in Tawfiq, the most contested neighborhood of Mogadishu, where soldiers of the current Somali government are busy trying to root out militia members of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which ruled Mogadishu for six months last year and managed to bring relative peace for the first time in 16 years. It was overthrown late last year by a force sent by neighboring Ethiopia with America's tacit blessing. Now the UIC's military wing, the shebab ("youth"), has retreated into a maze of shallow bunkers and sandy berms in the Tawfiq neighborhood from which the Islamist group drew most of its local support. A sign on a daub wall nearby advertised the (now closed) new falluja café--named after the Iraqi city razed by the Americans in late 2004 where the insurgency continues to simmer.

The government soldiers' overreaction to the woman buying juice is at least somewhat understandable. The first real suicide bomber in Somalia's history blew himself up last September, in a failed attempt to assassinate President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, whom many Somalis see as a puppet of Ethiopia and, by proxy, the United States. Since then, suicide bombers have detonated every few months.

During its brief tenure, the UIC had defeated Mogadishu's U.S.-backed warlords and quelled the clan divisions that riddle Somali life. It also set up sharia courts to administer justice and instill order in the name of Islam. To some degree, it worked. Somalis backed the UIC less for religious reasons than because, for the first time in almost two decades, Mogadishu wasn't a free-fire zone.

But the UIC had a much darker side: The shebab dug up and tossed out the bones of more than 700 dead Italians from an "infidel" cemetery and forced men to shave their heads as punishment for un-Islamic hairdos. They banned watching the World Cup and chewing the popular leafy stimulant qat. The head of the UIC's shura council, Sheik Hassan Aweys, was the military leader of Al Itti- had Al Islami, which launched several attacks against Ethiopia in the 1990s and had links to Al Qaeda. Also, in the second half of 2006, hundreds of foreign fighters reportedly arrived in Somalia to fight alongside the shebab. The UIC harbored several members of Al Qaeda, including Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the elusive mastermind reportedly behind the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in neighboring Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 225 people.

And so, last Christmas Eve, the Christian-led government of Ethiopia invaded and--supported, later, by U.S. air strikes--successfully dislodged the Islamist UIC, largely because it believed (correctly) that rebels backed by its enemy, Eritrea, were using Somalia as a staging area for attacks. The result is an occupation by Ethiopian soldiers that fuels the local insurgency, threatens to destabilize the Horn of Africa, and offers Al Qaeda an additional talking point in its campaign to persuade Muslims that the West has declared war upon them. Many of the region's Muslims saw the Ethiopian invasion as a Christmas present from Ethiopia's leaders to America's. "When the Americans started backing the Ethiopians around Christmas," one woman who supported the courts said, "we started calling the Ethiopians kafir, or infidels."

"The occupation in Somalia is having roughly the same effect as in parts of Iraq," John Prendergast, an analyst at the International Crisis Group and founder of the enough Project, says. "We know by now that the one thing that unifies Somalis and brings them into the streets for guerrilla-style operations is occupation." In other words, Somalia is shaping up to be a third blundered front, after Afghanistan and Iraq, in the war on terrorism.



As in Iraq, the overthrow of the UIC government has left widespread chaos in its wake. In the streets of Mogadishu, grazing cows and children sniffing glue compete to eat from piles of garbage. Qat is back too: Few dare to travel after 3 p.m., the hour at which government soldiers begin to chew. While qat is ostensibly a stimulant, the glassy, pink eyes of soldiers in the late afternoon, and their indifference to pulling the triggers of their automatic weapons, make it seem a soporific.

Casualties from the occupation and insurgency fill the 60 beds of a local hospital. When I visited, I met Abdi Ghani Mohammed Ali, a 30-year-old English teacher who clutched the drainage tube protruding from his abdomen. Out of work since war shut his school some months ago, Abdi sold mobile phones to Ethiopian soldiers to support his family. One day, he told me, the Ethiopians shot him, stole $1,000, and left him in the street to die. An 18-year-old boy had been admitted to the hospital several days earlier bleeding from his rectum. He had been gang-raped by government soldiers who belonged to one of Somalia's rival clans. ("It's not sexual; it's about power," an onlooker said.) A woman in intensive care was waiting for her sister, shot during a carjacking, to wake from a coma. "Under the Islamic courts," she said, "it wasn't possible for anyone to do this." Meanwhile, in the crowded room next door, a woman named Rogia poked at the cast on her right knee, where she had been shot by an Ethiopian sniper. "The Ethiopians hate our religion," she said. The hospital's one doctor was slightly embarrassed but translated for her nonetheless: "Muslims wouldn't do anything like this."

This is certainly how Al Qaeda would like the world's 1.3 billion Muslims to view what's happening in Somalia. In early 2007, Ayman Al Zawahiri called for attacks against the occupying Ethiopian soldiers using "ambushes, mines, raids, and martyrdom-seeking campaigns to devour them as the lions devour their prey." But his message wasn't meant merely for Somali ears; it was also intended to inflame Muslims worldwide by suggesting, once again, that the Christian West is at war with Islam.

Al Qaeda's interest in Somalia dates back to the early '90s, when, according to a recent report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, an "Africa Corps" made up of a dozen or so Al Qaeda members set out for Mogadishu from nearby Sudan. "Al Qaeda saw Somalia as being really crucial long before the U.S. did," explains Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower. "They look at the Horn of Africa as the gateway to the Red Sea: Egypt and Saudi Arabia are their main prizes." But, like the American peacekeepers sent by President Clinton in the early '90s, Al Qaeda's Africa Corps members found the failed state too problematic to build the infrastructure they needed. Their jihad ideology, moreover, was a tough sell among the Sufi-influenced Somalis, and it was hard to tear militants away from their clan loyalties and salaries. The Africa Corps letters make fascinating reading, tracing the evolution of Al Qaeda's mission from combating Somali communism to confronting "crusaders."

Al Qaeda has claimed some public relations victories in Somalia, notably Osama bin Laden's boast that his foot soldiers helped to bring down a Black Hawk helicopter and kill 18 American Rangers in Mogadishu in October 1993. That attack, he bragged later, set the "paper tiger" of the United States alight. And, as terrorism expert (and tnr contributor) Peter Bergen notes, Al Qaeda's first act of terrorism, the 1992 bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen, targeted American soldiers staying there--soldiers on their way to Somalia. "Al Qaeda saw Somalia as part of the American grab for Muslim lands that began in Saudi Arabia," Bergen says. "When you talk about cutting off the head of the snake,' where do you begin? Somalia."



In the end, though, resentment toward the U.S.-backed occupation may prove to be a greater destabilizing force for the entire region than Al Qaeda ever was, especially in Kenya, where the war on terrorism is directly linked to the rise of radical Islamic identity. In the name of chasing a few bad men, the Christmas invasion played into millennia of distrust between predominantly Christian Ethiopia (4050 percent of the population is Muslim) and Somalia, which is almost 100 percent Muslim. "The popular perception is that Christian soldiers are occupying a Muslim land," says Roland Marchal, a senior research fellow at Sciences-Po in Paris.

Ethiopians see Somalia as a haven for Islamic militants and insurgents backed by Eritrea, which would like to overthrow the repressive Ethiopian regime. But they also play up this analysis to encourage U.S. backing for their efforts to destroy the rebels. In 2002, during a visit by Senator Arlen Specter, Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi called the U.S. war on terrorism "something of a godsend." As Ethiopian Envoy to Somalia Fesaha Shawal recently explained, "Ethiopia and America have a common strategy, a common thinking, and a common enemy."

It's a point on which both sides concur. Ahmed Mohammed Hashim, an emaciated 25-year-old shebab foot soldier, told me, "Ethiopia is our first enemy. Right now, they go into our mosques with their shoes on; they shit and pee there." Second is the Ethiopia-backed interim government, "because it is illegitimate." And third: "America. America is the father of our enemy. America is using the Ethiopians to take over our country, and we're against them."

When I visited one head of the interim government, Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi, at his home, he argued that the de facto alliance between Ethiopia and the United States would eventually work to everyone's benefit. Surrounded by armed, glowering teenagers belonging to his clan in the heavily fortified Mogadishu neighborhood that one Somali journalist called the Lime Zone (to Baghdad's Green), Gedi told me: "The United States government is very cooperative. ...Somalia is a very important country from a geopolitical point of view in the war on terror."

A few hours later, a suicide truck bomber crashed through the gate of his compound, killing six people and injuring ten more. The prime minister was rushed to an undisclosed location. It was at least the third attempt on his life, and a great opportunity for spin. Soon after, my phone rang. It was the prime minister calling me directly--apart from the photographer Seamus Murphy, I was evidently the only Western journalist in Mogadishu. "This bombing will make the international community pay attention," he told me. "It is the mark of Al Qaeda."

Eliza Griswold is currently a Nieman Fellow in journalism at Harvard University. Her first book of poems, Wideawake Field, has just been published.

Security Dilemmas: Recasting The Darfur Debate

Interesting post about Darfur on Security Dilemmas blog:

"There are lots of ways that protecting innocent people being slaughtered by their government is in the US interest. There are lots of ways that stabilizing a volatile region is as well. President Bush in particular has shown himself to be open to this kind of argument; unfortunately, much of its force has been discredited by the debacle in Iraq."

I'm not sure I agree that Bush has shown himself to be open to this argument; rather he's open to using this argument when it suits his larger purposes. Is there any chance that he'll intervene in Darfur at the end of his lame-duck administration just as his father did in Somalia?

Heavy gunfire erupts in Mogadishu as peacekeepers land

By Sahal Abdulle MOGADISHU, March 6 (Reuters) - Insurgents unleashed two attacks against the Somali government and its foreign allies in Mogadishu on Tuesday, just hours after Ugandan peacekeepers assigned to tame the anarchic city landed.

The concerted assaults, some of the heaviest in weeks, appeared timed to coincide with the arrival of some 350 Ugandans in the vanguard of an African Union mission to help restore law to a country mired in chaos since central rule crumbled in 1991.

More than a dozen mortar strikes hit the airport, where the Ugandans were camped after landing earlier. A Ugandan army spokesman said none of the soldiers was wounded. "The military side of the airport has been hit. We cannot cross from this side to the other side," said a witness. The Ugandans were the first batch of peacekeepers to arrive in Mogadishu since a U.S. and U.N. operation ended in failure in 1995, after relentless street battles with local militiamen. Read the entire article

Somalia: Who's on First?

A helpful chronology of recent events in Somalia, courtesy of reuters.

March 6 (Reuters) - Insurgents attacked the airport in Mogadishu on Tuesday and fought a heavy battle with government and Ethiopian troops as Ugandan peacekeepers arrived in Somalia's lawless capital. Here is a chronology of recent events in Somalia:

Oct. 2004 - In 14th attempt since 1991 to restore central government, lawmakers elect Ethiopian-backed warlord Abdullahi Yusuf as president. In December, new Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Gedi swears in 27 ministers in Kenya.

Feb. 2006 - Lawmakers arrive in the southern city of Baidoa for the first meeting of the country's parliament on home soil. June 2006 - The Somalia Islamic Courts Council (SICC) seizes the capital Mogadishu from U.S.-backed warlords and takes control of parts of southern Somalia. The interim government and the SICC recognise each other in their first direct talks.

Sept. 25 - President Yusuf escapes a bomb attack that kills five outside parliament in Baidoa. -- Islamist fighters take over the southern port of Kismayo, Somalia's third largest city.

Oct. 9 - Islamists declare holy war against Ethiopia, which they accuse of invading Somalia to help the government.

Nov. 30 - Ethiopia's parliament votes to let its government take necessary steps to rebuff any invasion by the Islamists. Dec. 12 - Islamists tell Ethiopia to leave Somalia within seven days or face war.

Dec. 19 - Fighting starts following the end of the deadline.

Dec. 24 - Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi says he is waging war against the Islamists to protect his country's sovereignty, in Ethiopia's first public admission of military involvement in Somalia.

Dec. 28 - Islamists flee Mogadishu ahead of a joint Ethiopian and Somali government force which captures the city.

Dec. 31 - Somali Prime Minister Gedi enters Mogadishu.

Jan. 1, 2007 - Islamists abandon defences at Kismayu.

Jan. 8 - President Yusuf arrives in Mogadishu for the first time since he became president in 2004.

-- U.S. aircraft strike the southern village of Hayo, after it was believed that at least one al Qaeda suspect was sheltering there. Ethiopian and Somali troops had chased the Islamists' last remnants to the area.

Jan. 13 - Parliament declares a three-month state of emergency amid fears of a return to clan violence. Jan. 17 - Parliament ousts powerful speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan, who split with the president and prime minister late last year over his peace overtures to rival Islamists.

Jan. 17 - Parliament ousts powerful speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan, who split with the president and prime minister late last year over his peace overtures to rival Islamists.

Jan. 23 - Ethiopian forces begin leaving Mogadishu.

Feb. 20 - U.N. Security Council authorizes an African Union peacekeeping mission for Somalia for six months. March 6 - Some 350 Ugandan troops land at Mogadishu airport amidst pitch battles between insurgents and government and Ethiopian troops.

March 1 - A Ugandan vanguard of an African Union peace force to help the interim government flies into Baidoa.

March 6 - Some 350 Ugandan troops land at Mogadishu airport amidst pitch battles between insurgents and government and Ethiopian troops.

No Rest for a Feminist Fighting Radical Islam

by William Grimes
The New York Times

INFIDEL

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Illustrated. Free Press. 353 pages. $26.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali came to the attention of the wider world in an extraordinary way. In 2004 a Muslim fanatic, after shooting the filmmaker Theo van Gogh dead on an Amsterdam street, pinned a letter to Mr. van Gogh’s chest with a knife. Addressed to Ms. Hirsi Ali, the letter called for holy war against the West and, more specifically, for her death.

A Somali by birth and a recently elected member of the Dutch Parliament, Ms. Hirsi Ali had waged a personal crusade to improve the lot of Muslim women. Her warnings about the dangers posed to the Netherlands by unassimilated Muslims made her Public Enemy No. 1 for Muslim extremists, a feminist counterpart to Salman Rushdie.

The circuitous, violence-filled path that led Ms. Hirsi Ali from Somalia to the Netherlands is the subject of “Infidel,” her brave, inspiring and beautifully written memoir. Narrated in clear, vigorous prose, it traces the author’s geographical journey from Mogadishu to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and her desperate flight to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage.

At the same time, Ms. Hirsi Ali describes a journey “from the world of faith to the world of reason,” a long, often bitter struggle to come to terms with her religion and the clan-based traditional society that defined her world and that of millions of Muslims all over.

Ms. Hirsi Ali, now 37, belongs to the Osman Mahamud subclan of the Darod clan. Its members, by tradition, are born to rule, which may explain the author’s self-possessed, imperious gaze on the cover of her book. Her mother came from a family of nomads, and Ms. Hirsi Ali grew up listening to desert folk tales narrated by her grandmother, who, like many Somalis, followed a “diluted, relaxed” version of Islam that included traditional magic spirits and genies. It also required that young girls undergo genital mutilation, which Ms. Hirsi Ali, a victim of the practice, describes in horrific detail.

Somalia’s troubled politics provided Ms. Hirsi Ali with an eventful childhood. Her father, an opponent of the country’s Soviet-backed dictator, spent years in prison. The family, living on clan charity, moved to Saudi Arabia, where Ms. Hirsi Ali recoiled at the local interpretation of Islam, and later to Ethiopia and Kenya, where Ms. Hirsi Ali added Swahili and English to her growing list of languages. Without knowing it, she was becoming a permanent outsider, a misfit wherever she traveled.

The family was politically liberal but pious, with one foot in the remote past and the other in the modern world. In Nairobi, her grandmother kept a sheep in the bathtub at night and herded it during the day. Ms. Hirsi Ali, at her English-language school, devoured Nancy Drew mysteries and English adventure series, “tales of freedom, adventure, of equality between girls and boys, trust and friendship.” She eventually became a woman very like one of George Eliot’s heroines — earnest, high-minded and ardent, forever chafing at the limits imposed by her religion and her society.

Rebellion came slowly. Ms. Hirsi Ali, under the spell of a kindly Islamic evangelist, passed through a deeply religious phase. She describes, quite persuasively, the attractions of fundamentalism and the growing appeal of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in disintegrating societies like Somalia’s. But nagging questions disturbed her faith, especially as she encountered inflexible doctrines on the role of women, and their need to submit to men.

“Life on earth is a test, and I was failing it, even though I was trying as hard as I knew how to,” she writes of her anguished, questioning adolescence. “I was failing as a Muslim.”

In 1992, in her early 20s, Ms. Hirsi Ali made a dash for freedom. Instead of joining her new husband in Canada, she bolted to the Netherlands. There, she pretended to be fleeing political persecution, and the authorities granted her refugee status. She had brought shame on her family and her clan, but the order and rationality of the Netherlands intoxicated her, right down to the houses “all the same color, laid out in rows like neat little cakes warm from the oven.” She could not imagine what the Dutch had to vote about, since everything seemed to work perfectly.

Ms. Hirsi Ali’s struggles to gain a toehold in her new country, and her perceptions of the West, told through innocent eyes, put flesh and blood on an immigrant story repeated countless times throughout Western Europe. Alienation, dislocation and the burden of too many choices warp the lives of people rooted in traditional societies based on clans and tribes. Ms. Hirsi Ali’s own sister, who joins her in the Netherlands, sinks into deep depression and psychosis.

Fluent in English, and determined to learn Dutch, the highly adaptable Ms. Hirsi Ali makes her way, first as a translator for various social services, then as a political researcher for the Labor Party, and eventually as a political candidate with uncomfortable views on Islam, immigration and assimilation.

Ms. Hirsi Ali, disturbed at the economic and social plight of Muslims, warned the Dutch that their liberal policy of helping immigrants create separate cultural and religious institutions was counterproductive. She deplored the crimes of violence against Muslim women committed daily in the Netherlands, to which the authorities turned a blind eye in the name of cultural understanding. After the 9/11 attacks, she was vocal in insisting that, despite well-meaning assurances to the contrary, there really was a meaningful link between the Muslim faith and terrorism.

“Holland was trying to be tolerant for the sake of consensus, but the consensus was empty,” she writes. “The immigrants’ culture was being preserved at the expense of their women and children and to the detriment of the immigrants’ integration into Holland.”

Ms. Hirsi Ali’s provocative comments on Islam and on the need for Muslim women to reject their traditionally submissive role (the subject of a short film she made with Mr. van Gogh) channeled mounting Muslim anger directly at her.

Death threats have since driven Ms. Hirsi Ali to the United States, where she has accepted a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group.

This is a pity. As a politician, she focused Dutch minds on a subject they steadfastly ignored. In her brief career, she forced the government to keep statistics on honor killings, in which enraged family members murder sisters or daughters believed to have brought shame on the family or clan. Much to the surprise of the Dutch, it turned out that there were a lot of them. Unfortunately, Ms. Hirsi Ali is no longer in the Netherlands to point out these things.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Oil in Somalia?

This is not really a blog. I don't really have the time or patience for that. NomadNet has -- since it went online in 1994 -- been a repository of information about Somalia, foreign aid, and Western misadventures in Africa. I often posted articles that I didn't agree with because I thought they were interesting or should be read. One of the first pieces I posted in those early days was one called The Oil Factor in Somalia. It sat in the archive for years, getting hit on occasionally, but largely forgotten. Suddenly, however, there are thousands of hits on the piece. It's been cited in blogs and web sites across the internet as if it's some leaked piece of damning confidential intelligence. (See The Final Call, among others.) It's not. The fact is that oil company interest in Somalia remains minimal and perfunctory. Oil companies, like the CIA, keep their greasy fingers in as many foreign pies as possible. Turn over any rock in an African desert and you'll find an oil man.

This isn't to say that nefarious forces are not at work in Somalia, Darfur, and other places. And, as the Final Call article asks, where is the outrage over the recent bombing in Somalia? Are Americans willing to tolerate any atrocity so long as our government does it in the name of fighting terror?

These are the important questions and they should not be obscured by flimsy oil-industry conspiracy theories that ultimately serve only to undermine those very arguments. You've got to do better than a 14-year-old article from the LA Times.

Life Under the Jihad in Mogadishu