Islamists Advancing in Somalia Showing Strength Over the tfg

[Jacaylbaro]

Islamists dismantle pro-government roadblocks in south Somalia

 

 

MOGADISHU, Sept 19 (Reuters) - Islamist fighters from Somalia's hardline al Shabaab group chased pro-government militia from roadblocks across the south of the country on Friday in their latest show of strength.

 

Al Shabaab gunmen seized the strategic southern port of Kismayu last month after days of fighting, and residents say they have been expanding their area of control ever since.

 

"Al Shabaab has removed the militia checkpoints from Kismayu up to Kilometre 50. We now travel peacefully," Abdirahman Hussein, a local driver, told Reuters, referring to a point 50 km (31 miles) south of the capital Mogadishu.

 

"The militias used to force us to pay fees at each roadblock, and sometimes they robbed our passengers. Now we pass in peace and pay nothing," he said.

 

Al Shabaab officials could not be reached for comment.

 

Since the start of last year, the rebels have waged an Iraq-style insurgency of mortar attacks, roadside bombings and assassinations targeting the fragile Western-back interim government and its Ethiopian military allies.

 

This year, Washington officially listed the group as a terrorist organisation with close ties to al Qaeda.

 

Al Shabaab has also threatened to shoot down any planes that try to land at Mogadishu's international airport and no aircraft have attempted to use it since the group's Tuesday deadline.

 

On Friday, the government's director of civil aviation said it had cancelled the licences of all airlines that had heeded the "unimportant and baseless" threats from the Islamists.

 

Fighting in Somalia has killed more than 9,500 civilians since last year, and an unknown number of combatants. More than 1 million people have been forced from their homes.

 

Washington sees the country as a training ground for extremists and says radical Islamist leaders have made much of it a safe haven for high level suspects, including the bombers of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania a decade ago.

 

U.S. military forces have launched several air strikes inside Somalia in recent months.

 

Asha Osman, a mother of six, said al Shabaab's removal of the roadblocks was positive. But she feared a northern advance of the group towards the capital might bring more trouble.

 

"Who can stand the bombardment of U.S. planes?" she asked.

[Jacaylbaro]

Battles rock Mogadishu, Islamists show strength

 

MOGADISHU, Sept 19 (Reuters) - Somalia's warring parties pounded each other with artillery in Mogadishu on Friday after an African Union military aircraft defied a rebel ban on planes using the capital's international airport.

 

Witnesses said at least 15 people were killed.

 

The bombed-out city's airport had been abandoned since Tuesday after Islamist insurgents from the hardline al Shabaab group vowed to shoot down any aircraft trying to land there.

 

In another demonstration of their increasing strength, the Islamists also chased away pro-government militia manning roadblocks in the south of the lawless Horn of Africa nation.

 

On Friday, a plane carrying AU peacekeepers braved the rebel threats and touched down at the Mogadishu airstrip, provoking a barrage of mortar fire from the insurgents.

 

Government forces and their Ethiopian allies responded with missiles, heavy machine guns and mortar rounds of their own.

 

An AU spokesman in the city said the aircraft had been carrying troops from Burundi, but that none of them were hurt.

 

As usual in Somalia, civilians bore the brunt of the fighting. At least four residents died and seven were injured when one shell detonated in the Kilometre 4 area of Mogadishu.

 

SHELLS KILL CIVILIANS

 

"A group of local teenagers was sitting playing cards here under a big tree," witness Abdullahi Farah told Reuters. "Now their flesh is scattered everywhere."

 

Residents said six bodies lay in another area and that a house nearby was hit and burning with three bodies inside.

 

An official at the city's main Madena Hospital said about 50 wounded civilians had been admitted. Two of them, including a two-year-old child, later died of their injuries.

 

Since early 2007 the Islamists have waged an Iraq-style insurgency of mortar attacks, roadside bombings and assassinations targeting the fragile Western-back interim government and its Ethiopian military allies.

 

This year, Washington officially listed the group as a terrorist organisation with close ties to al Qaeda.

 

Fighting in Somalia has killed more than 9,500 civilians since the start of last year, and an unknown number of gunmen. More than 1 million people have been forced from their homes.

 

Earlier on Friday, the government's director of civil aviation said it had cancelled the licences of all airlines that heeded the "unimportant and baseless" threats from the Islamists and had stopped flying into Mogadishu airport.

[Mad_Mullah]

Where is General Loser?

[Naxar Nugaaleed]

children hiding in the bushes throwing grenades and rpgs can hardly be called strength!

[Jacaylbaro]

Those children closed the airport, captured Kismayo and sitting between each and every Tuulo where a single convoy cannot go to the other village without it is attacked on the road.

[Jacaylbaro]

Somali insurgents shake Mogadishu, 23 dead

 

 

NAIROBI, Sept 22 (Reuters) - Islamist insurgents pounded Mogadishu on Monday in attacks that brought the death toll in the last 24 hours to at least 23 people, witnesses said.

 

The Somali rebels attacked two bases of African Union (AU) peacekeepers, shelled the city's main airport and also struck government targets in the bustling Bakara market area.

 

Despite U.N. efforts to broker a peace deal, fighting has worsened this month in Somalia, where Islamists are battling the interim government and its Ethiopian military backers.

 

Merchants in Bakara market said they had counted 11 corpses from Monday's latest fighting. Shells also landed in the morning around Mogadishu airport, where a commercial flight defied a ban by the militant al Shabaab group to land.

 

Residents also said at least a dozen people had died in fighting on Sunday. "A missile hit a neighbour's house and killed 9 people in the same family," one resident, Farhiya Abdullahi, told Reuters of the worst incident.

 

Islamists launched an Iraq-style insurgency in early 2007 that has killed nearly 10,000 civilians and an unknown number of combatants.

[Jacaylbaro]

Somali Islamists target AU soldiers, 11 civilians die

 

MOGADISHU, Sept 24 (Reuters) - Islamists attacked African peacekeepers in Mogadishu, sparking a battle that killed 11 civilians and sent many fleeing the city in Somalia's escalating insurgency, witnesses said on Wednesday.

 

"We have no hope now and I think this is the end of Mogadishu," mother-of-seven Fatuma Kassim said, joining a stream of residents escaping the coastal capital.

 

The insurgents have this month increasingly turned their fire on African Union (AU) troops in what analysts view as a tactic to prevent any further foreign intervention in the Horn of Africa nation, engulfed in civil conflict since 1991.

 

Mogadishu shook on Tuesday night as an AU base was shelled from various sides, prompting heavy return fire and tank incursions into a market area viewed as a rebel stronghold.

 

The African Union, whose 2,200 Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers have done little to quell the war, said it suffered no casualties.

 

The pan-African body wants to hand over to the United Nations, but that organisation is wary of entering a quagmire some are calling "Africa's Iraq", especially given its disastrous attempt to impose peace there in the early 1990s.

 

"The insurgents have decided to hit the AU hard to intimidate Africa from sending any more soldiers and to make the likelihood of U.N. intervention even more remote," said a Western diplomat who tracks Somalia.

 

Once again, it was Mogadishu residents counting their dead on Wednesday. Since the insurgency began at the start of 2007, nearly 10,000 civilians have died.

 

"A big shell killed five people after it landed on them as they ran to take cover," witness Osman Farah said.

 

"We have just collected their corpses."

 

Another resident, Aden Ismail, said a missile landed on a group of refugees in a ruined former college, killing two.

 

"Then another mortar dropped and injured seven others. We could not take them to hospital because there was gunfire everywhere," he said. "We have carried three injured children on our shoulders and three men in wheelbarrows this morning."

 

Islamist spokesman Abdirahim Isse Adow said Tuesday night's attack was retribution for the shelling of a market earlier in the week, which he blamed on the peacekeepers.

 

Thirty civilians died in Bakara market on Monday, with all sides blaming each other for bombing the crowded area.

 

"It is clear that the Islamists are about to take control of the country. The government and Ethiopian troops control only a small portion of the city let alone the country," he said.

 

About one million Somalis live as internal refugees in what aid agencies call one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

 

Drought and high food prices have compounded the effect of the conflict on a traumatised population.

 

With kidnappings and assassinations of aid workers rife, relief agencies face a dangerous task to help Somalis.

 

A U.S. expert on Somalia, John Prendergast, said the insurgents now view outside players -- from the African Union to relief groups -- as helping the government.

 

"They look at most of these external actors as probably sympathetic to the TFG (Transitional Federal Government) or at least facilitating the TFG's goals, so shutting out as many of these people as possible, whether NGO or U.N. actors, will only help the Islamists," he said.

[Jacaylbaro]

ANALYSIS-Insurgents take upper hand in Somalia

 

 

NAIROBI, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Nearly two years after being driven from Mogadishu, Islamists have re-taken swathes of south Somalia and may have their sights again on the capital.

 

The insurgents' push is being led by Al Shabaab, or "Youth" in Arabic, the most militant in a wide array of groups opposed to the Somali government and military backers from Ethiopia, an ally in Washington's "War on Terror".

 

"Shabaab are winning. They have pursued a startlingly successful two-pronged strategy -- chase all the internationals from the scene, and shift tactics from provocation to conquest," said a veteran Somali analyst in the region.

 

"Before it was 'hit-and-run' guerrilla warfare. Now it's a case of 'we're here to stay'," he added, noting Shabaab was "flooded with money" from foreign backers.

 

The Islamist insurgency since early 2007, the latest instalment in Somalia's 17-year civil conflict, has worsened one of Africa's worst humanitarian crises and fomented instability around the already chronically volatile Horn region.

 

Shabaab's advances are galling to Washington, which says the group is linked to al Qaeda and has put it on its terrorism list. Western security services have long worried about Somalia becoming a haven for extremists, though critics -- and the Islamists -- say that threat has been fabricated to disguise U.S. aims to keep control, via Ethiopia, in the region.

 

Some compare the Somali quagmire to Iraq in character, if not scale, given its appeal to jihadists, the involvement of foreign troops and the tactics used by the rebels.

 

In August, in its most significant grab of a gradual territorial encroachment, Shabaab spearheaded the takeover of Kismayu, a strategic port and south Somalia's second city.

 

This month, its threats to shoot down planes have largely paralysed Mogadishu airport. And in recent days, its fighters have been targeting African peacekeepers.

 

"The only question is 'what next?" said a diplomat, predicting Shabaab would next seek to close Mogadishu port and take control of Baidoa town, the seat of parliament.

 

Analysts say Islamists or Islamist-allied groups now control most of south Somalia, with the exception of Mogadishu, Baidoa where parliament is protected by Ethiopian troops, and Baladwayne near the border where Addis Ababa garrisons soldiers.

 

That is a remarkable turnaround from the end of 2006, when allied Somali-Ethiopian troops chased the Islamists out of Mogadishu after a six-month rule of south Somalia, scattering them to sea, remote hills and the Kenyan border.

 

The Islamists regrouped to begin an insurgency that has killed nearly 10,000 civilians. Military discipline, grassroots political work, youth recruitment and an anti-Ethiopian rallying cry have underpinned their return, analysts say.

 

With the Islamists split into many rival factions, it is impossible to tell if an offensive against Mogadishu is imminent. Analysts say Shabaab and other Islamist militants may not want an all-out confrontation with Ethiopian troops, preferring to wait until Addis Ababa withdraws forces.

 

WORLD "NUMB" TO SOMALIA

 

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is fed up with the human, political and financial cost of his Somalia intervention, but knows withdrawal could hasten the fall of Mogadishu.

 

The insurgents may also resist the temptation to launch an offensive on Mogadishu until their own ranks are united.

 

"Opposition forces at the moment are internally debating whether or not it's time for a major push," the diplomat said.

 

Meanwhile, the rebels attack government and Ethiopian targets in the city seemingly at will. Of late, they have also been hitting African Union (AU) peacekeepers, who number just 2,200, possibly to warn the world against more intervention.

 

Estimates vary but experts think Ethiopia has about 10,000 soldiers in Somalia, the government about 10,000 police and soldiers. Islamist fighter numbers are fluid but may match that.

 

The Islamists' growth in power has gone largely unnoticed outside Somalia by all but experts. For the wider world, Somalia's daily news of bombs, assassinations, piracy and kidnappings has blurred into an impression of violence-as-usual.

 

Even this week's horrors, including shells slicing up 30 civilians in a market, registered barely a blip outside.

 

"The world has grown numb to Somalia's seemingly endless crises," said analyst Ken Menkhaus.

 

But "much is new this time, and it would be a dangerous error of judgement to brush off Somalia's current crisis as more of the same," he said. "Seismic political, social, and security changes are occurring in the country."

 

The United Nations has been pushing a peace agreement in neighbouring Djibouti that would see a ceasefire, a pull-back of Ethiopian troops -- the insurgents' main bone of contention -- then some sort of power-sharing arrangement.

 

Diplomats see that as the main hope for stability, and moderates on both sides support it in principle. But Islamist fighters on the ground have rejected the process, and negotiators failed to agree on details last week.

 

A U.S. expert on Somalia, John Prendergast, said the world had taken its eyes off the conflict at its peril.

 

"Somalia truly is the one place in Africa where you have a potential cauldron of recruitment and extremism that, left to its own devices, will only increase in terms of the danger it presents to the region, and to American and Western interests."

 

One effect of the conflict impinging on the outside world is rampant piracy off Somalia. Gangs have captured some 30 boats this year, and still hold a dozen ships with 200 or so hostages.

 

The violence is also impeding relief groups from helping Somalia's several million hungry. Foreign investors, interested in principle in Somalia's hydrocarbon and fishing resources, barely give the place a second thought in the current climate.