Flawed Sheikhs and Failed Strategies: Lessons of the Jihadist Debacle in Somalia

[General Duke]

Flawed Sheikhs and Failed Strategies: Lessons of the Jihadist Debacle in Somalia

By Seifulaziz Milas

Flawed Sheikhs and Failed Strategies: Lessons of the Jihadist Debacle in Somalia

By Seifulaziz Milas

Published on: Feb 20, 2007

Printable VersionIntroduction

 

 

Launching attacks across other countries’ borders is often a serious mistake, as it entitles them to return the compliment. You cannot rationally expect to just go home and claim sovereignty. It is a lesson that Sheikh Aweys would have done well to learn at a much earlier stage, when after launching terrorist attacks into Ethiopia from bases in Somalia, he had to flee to Ras Kamboni and Mogadishu, when Ethiopia eventually responded.

 

The leader of Somalia’s Supreme Council of the Islamic Courts (SCIC), the Al-Qaeda linked Islamist group of Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, whose militia over-ran much of southern and central Somalia, between June and December 2006, used an initially successful strategy of talking peace and making war. For months, it helped to diffuse resistance, lull opponents into a false sense of security, and divert the attention of regional organizations and the international community from the nature of the SCIS and its potential threat to Somali, regional, and basic human security. The ambivalent attitude of much of the international community, and the engagement of some elements of the Arab League appeared to contribute to the problem.

 

Now the SCIC strategy has run its course, with disastrous results for the SCIC and its followers. The Islamist extremist group tried to jump too far, too fast and wound up taking a very bad fall. On 22 December 2006, following yet another SCIC cross-border incursion into Ethiopian territory, the Ethiopian Government issued a final warning that was apparently dismissed by the SCIC. Ethiopia reacted on 24 December, with multiple strikes against the SCIC militias. On the same day, the Associated Press quoted an Ethiopian Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying that Ethiopia was taking measures to counterattack the SCIC and foreign terrorist groups.1

 

Following the initial clashes, the SCIC militias were soon in full flight across much of central and southern Somalia, abandoning their positions ahead of the advance of the Ethiopian and Somali Transitional Federal Government forces. Clearly, the SCIC policy of talking peace and making war had reached its limits. For the previous five months, they had expanded their sway to towns across most of central and southern Somalia, by the simple expedient of arriving in towns and communities with massive displays of armed force that local residents had found too dangerous to resist.

 

The Ethiopian response was hard and fast, and the SCIC militias quickly lost their will to fight, abandoning after town before the fast-moving Ethiopian and TFG forces could reach them. On 28 December, the TFG forces with Ethiopian backup entered Mogadishu, to the cheers of the population, while others continued to chase the remnants of the SCIC and their foreign allies, who had already fled toward the southern port city of Kismayo. During the night of 31 December, the SCIC abandoned Kismayo without a fight and fled under cover of darkness, towards a small dhow port at Ras Kamboni and the nearby Kenyan border.

 

During their brief occupation of central and southern Somalia, the SCIC leadership had thoroughly alienated most of the population by its erratic behavior and attempts to impose an extremist version of Islam—unknown in Somalia. They distinguished themselves in the commission of diverse crimes against humanity, including shooting young people for watching videos of football games, ordering the execution of any Somalian who did not pray five times daily, and forcible recruitment of young children into their militia forces, along the lines of the “Lord’s Resistance Army” (LRA) in Uganda. Here there might be a useful role for the International Criminal Court (ICC) as regards members of the SCIC leadership who may have managed to escape.

[General Duke]

The Rise of the SCIC

 

The residents of Mogadishu and other central Somali towns had welcomed the expulsion of the warlords, but their replacement by the SCIC, much less so. The warlords had made their lives difficult for more than a decade and they hoped for something better. They were happy to see the warlords go, but they were not expecting the Islamic Courts to be transformed into an armed political group attempting to impose a fundamentalist ‘Salafi’ version of Islam on Somali society. The new Islamist rulers had brought a measure of peace, but also a new type of clerical control and limitation of individual freedom that most Somalis neither believed in nor could accept—and one very open to abuse.

 

Mogadishu had represented the face of a stateless Somalia, where brutal warlords ruled in lawless fiefdoms. In much of southern Somalia, similar conditions prevailed, where those same warlords, alone or in alliance with their local equivalents, had subjugated local populations—often from different clans—and forcefully appropriated land and resources. But that is not the whole story.

 

Further north, in central Somalia, the origin of most of the Mogadishu warlords, many local communities had already restored a measure of peace, and established their own sub-clan based governance mechanisms. Here, the legitimacy of the factions was being challenged and alternative forms of leadership and authority were beginning to emerge, with new leaders ruling with the broad consent of their people and supported by legitimate taxes and duties rather than extortion.

 

In Northern Somalia, which comprises the regions least affected by the collapse of the Somali State, and with more than a third of its population, this process had gone much further.2 In the Northwest, the former British Somaliland declared its independence in 1991, and went about the difficult but ultimately successful process of rebuilding its Somaliland Republic, with a robust and stable democracy, and a growing economy.

 

In the Northeast, the regions largely inhabited by the ....clan restored peace and a measure of law and order and established their own autonomous state under the name of Puntland, with a functional government and economy and little connection with the stateless turbulence of central and southern Somalia.3

 

In the Northeast, Northwest and in the RRA regions of southwestern Somalia, the aggression of the SCIC and its efforts to forcibly impose a Taliban-like hardcore fundamentalist regime on populations under its control came to pose the principal threats to human security. Both Somaliland and Puntland came out strongly against any establishment of the SCIC’s “Islamic courts” in their territory.

 

The Puntland Authorities quickly deployed their troops to their border with central Somalia to repulse any incursions by the SCIC militias. This is where a peacekeeping force with a proper mandate might have made a contribution to peace. The UN finally approved sending such a force, but, hindered by opposing voices in the Security Council, it did so far too late, when it was no longer relevant.

 

The SCIC was highly dependent on its strategy of threatening to bring foreign jihadis if a peacekeeping mission should come to Somalia. In fact, they were already bringing in contingents of foreign jihadis, with weaponry and terrorist technology that has increasingly been used in terrorist attacks within Somalia. Many of these foreign terrorists fled to Kismayo with their SCIC hosts. Some were believed to be heading to Ras Kamboni, from where they could try to escape by boat.

 

The SCIC and some of their foreign advocates claimed that the Islamist group controlled the majority of Somalia’s population. But this was never true. They controlled Mogadishu; eventually most of the.......-populated regions of central Somalia, and the non-....... regions overrun by their militias in the South. But they continued to talk peace while conquering new territory. If no effective measures had been taken to stop them, they just might have eventually controlled the majority of Somalia’s population.

 

At that point, in view of the known recklessness of Sheikh Aweys, it is entirely possible that he might undertake the second part of his frequently announced agenda, that is, taking over the areas of the countries bordering on Somalia that are inhabited by nearly half of the region’s ethnic Somali population. That would almost certainly have led to a devastating regional war. As it is, he apparently sent his militia on one too many cross-border incursions into Ethiopian territory, even after being warned.

[General Duke]

The Turbulent South and the SCIC/ICU

 

When the representatives of the TFG and the SCIC met in Khartoum on 22 June 2006, the ICU agreed that it recognized the TFG as the legal and legitimate government of Somalia. For its part, the TFG recognized that the SCIC represented a political reality in Somalia. Having agreed on these points, the SCIC rejected them immediately on the return of its delegation to Mogadishu. At the same time, they continued their rapid advance to the North—aimed at seizing control of much of the rest of the country and setting up their own regime.

 

Actually, the peace talks in Khartoum, facilitated by the Arab League, with its own pro-SCIC agenda to push, were never likely to get very far. For the SCIC, this was primarily a means of diverting attention and buying time to occupy as much as possible of the country, while discouraging any potential efforts to reinforce the TFG. At the same time, certain Arab League counties, and others, were using the talks to divert attention from their own intensification of arms supply and training for the SCIC militias.

 

While the better-known extremists were initially keeping a lower profile, it was quite rational to avoid alarming potential victims or prematurely provoking known adversaries. Having taken the strategic town of Beledweyne, over 300 kms to the northwest of Mogadishu, without a fight but through a show of overwhelming force, this strategy seemed to be working well. But in the wake of inconclusive peace talks in Khartoum the announcement of the transformation of the ICU into a new organization led by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys left little room for wishful thinking about the “moderate” intentions of the Council of the Islamic Courts (ICU)/Supreme Council of the Islamic Courts (SCIC).

 

The SCIC leader, ex-Colonel Hassan Dahir Aweys, had long before established his terrorist credentials in the region in the mid-1990’s when his Al-Ittihad group carried out terrorist attacks in Ethiopia from bases in Somalia’s Gedo region. When the bases were eventually destroyed, a number of Arab jihadists were among the casualties. But, Sheikh Aweys, the commander of the Al-Ittihad militia was able to escape to Mogadishu, where he began rebuilding his organization. The Al-Ittihad logistics base at Ras Kamboni, a small dhow port on the coast of the southern-most tip of Somalia near the Kenyan town of Lamu—a key entry-point for Al-Ittihad’s arms supplies and Arab trainers sent by their supporters in the Gulf—was left untouched.

 

The Ras Kamboni base may have also been the entry point for some of the arms and terrorists later infiltrated into Kenya’s coast region. It was reportedly abandoned, following the Al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, when Ittihad leaders feared retaliation from the Americans and deemed Mogadishu a much safer place to hide. More recently, however, since the ICU takeover in Mogadishu, one of the Ittihad militia leaders, Hassan “Turki,” was reported passing through the Juba Valley from Ras Kamboni with a group of militia, moving towards Mogadishu.

 

The initially "moderate" stance of the ICU soon gave way to the much harsher reality of hard-core fundamentalists with increasingly visible similarities to Afghanistan’s Taliban, who along with Al-Qaeda, reportedly trained some of them. Their extremist Salafi concepts of Islam tend to clash with the more tolerant Sufi traditions of Somali Muslims. The ICU militias, having spread across most of central Somalia, launched an attack to the south in late September and captured the port city of Kismayo near the border of Kenya.

 

For some foreign “experts,” the real surprise came after the June 2006 defeat of the Mogadishu warlords, when Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, who served as the moderate face of the ICU and front man for Aweys, was sidelined, and the ICU suddenly transformed into a new “Supreme Council of the Islamic Courts” (SCIC), headed by Hassan Dahir Aweys, the founder of Al-Itihad Al-Islamiya, which carried out a series of terrorist attacks in Ethiopia in the 1990’s.

 

For Somalis, the implications took longer to materialize, but were, in many ways, less surprising. The conflict in Mogadishu soon turned into an intricate combination of inter-clan and intra-clan conflicts, with fighting between.............. subclans, and among both. The battle between the SCIS and the Mogadishu warlords was also a battle between two key subclans, the. In the event, the South Mogadishu won. It also established that the SCIS is essentially a ..........clan organization, largely controlled by the sub-clan, and within it, the....lineage. The perception of this among the..... and other clans posed an important constraint on the growth of the SCIS beyond the .......... clan and reportedly has contributed to tensions between different sub-clans of the .

[General Duke]

Meanwhile, the SCIC leadership was well aware of the tendency of Somali clan coalitions and agreements to collapse. Having failed to gain total......Mogadishu support, it desperately needed to build influence outside the.... area. But its efforts to set up Islamic courts in Puntland and other areas outside its control had been blocked, and its establishment of Islamic courts in the occupied southern regions, depended on the continued presence of the SCIC militia, a situation that became unsustainable.

[General Duke]

Clan, Theocracy, and Economic Issues

 

Sheikh Aweys’ repeated announcements that he planned to take over the ethnic Somali regions of Ethiopia and Kenya to form a "Greater Somalia," was not only intended to threaten Ethiopia and Kenya, it was particularly intended to rally Somali sentiment against a perceived external enemy and to fire up Somali nationalism in an effort to divert attention of theMogadishu clans from their internal issue of dealing with increasing His sub-clans domination through the mechanism of the Islamic Courts. This became a structural problem of the SCIC that it could not easily resolve, as it was not simply a matter of political power sharing, but one of fundamental South Mogadishu economic interests.

 

One of the key issues that has always impeded any real progress towards a comprehensive peace in Somalia is that the........ are relative newcomers to Mogadishu and the South. They came in 1991-92 with General Aidiid from the poverty-stricken, drought-devastated pastoral lands of central Somalia to take over South Mogadishu and the agricultural lands of Lower Shabelle and Lower Juba. During 1990-1995, Mogadishu changed from being a multi-clan capital with a non-H majority to aN occupied city—as most of the non-CLAN population fled. The Xasam Dahir Clan, in particular, took over the most developed part of the city.

 

This leads to a major problem for any future administration: the issue of land ownership in Mogadishu, particularly South Mogadishu, Lower Shabelle and the Lower Juba Valley. The bottom line is that the former owners of urban property in South Mogadishu, and rural property in Lower Shabelle and Lower Juba, will want their property back. It is unlikely that the Xasan Dahir clan will be prepared to return it. This has made it difficult for the SCIC to build reliable constituencies in the non-H regions of southern Somalia. It also makes retaining control of the SCIC or whatever government might arise, an imperative for the effective protection of economic interests. The awareness of this was always likely to ensure strong opposition from other clans to Xasan Dahir's control of government, even when cloaked in the guise of a supposedly non-clan theocracy.