From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Wed Dec 02 2009 - 09:22:44 EST
Assessing Somalia’s Terror Threat
Despite increased efforts of young members of the Somali diaspora to fight
at home, it is unlikely that Somalia will turn into a large-scale training
ground for jihadists, unless it becomes a major hotspot for confrontation
against the West, Georg-Sebastian Holzer writes for ISN Security Watch.
By Georg-Sebastian Holzer for ISN Security Watch
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Recent activities by US citizens of Somali decent are setting new records in
the US security arena. Last weeks’ unveiling of terrorism-related charges
against 14 US nationals who allegedly helped 20 young Americans to join the
Somali al-Shabaab movement is the largest group of Americans suspected of
joining an extremist movement affiliated with al-Qaida since 9/11.
More infamously, the first known US citizen suicide bomber, involved in the
simultaneous terrorist attacks in Somaliland and Puntland on 29 October
2008, was of Somali descent.
However, this development is not confined to the US, which has an estimated
200,000-strong Somali diaspora concentrated in the Minneapolis-St Paul area
in the midwestern state of Minnesota. Most recently, Britain’s MI5 was
warning ministers of an increased number of young Britons travelling to
Somalia to fight a ‘holy war,’ some of whom do not have direct family
connection to the country. The official estimate gives a number of 100 young
Britons, but the true figure could be higher when counting those entering
the country overland.
The biggest surprise to counterterrorism analysts concerned with Somalia
might yet have been an incident in Australia, a country with no significant
diaspora. In August this year, the police claimed to have foiled a suicide
plot by four young men of Somali and Lebanese descent to storm a Sydney
military base and kill as many soldiers as possible. It is unclear if they
hatched the plot on their own or with the connivance of al-Shabaab.
The next Afghanistan?
Taking into account the enduring state failure and the rise of radical
Islamic movements that now control most parts of south/central Somalia, many
ask if the country might resemble Afghanistan in the 1990s, becoming a save
haven and training ground for jihadists from Somalia’s huge diaspora and
others.
In fact, this is a question Osama Bin Laden himself was already
contemplating when he was looking for his next stop after leaving Khartoum
in 1996. It is said that the Somali clan militias were too untrustworthy to
provide security, and the country’s Islamist groups were left in the cold by
al-Qaida’s global vision, leading bin Laden to opt for Afghanistan instead.
Bin Laden’s conclusions might still hold true today. “Due to poor
infrastructure and the prevalence of local warlords and the hundreds of
concomitant armed checkpoints, moving men, information and material is slow
and requires the frequent payments of bribes [making] Somalia a costly and
difficult place for outsiders to operate,” Bill Braniff, FBI program manager
and instructor at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, told ISN
Security Watch.
In addition, “many of the most well-established Islamist training camps are
not Salafi-jihadi training camps, but camps run by nationalist Islamists
that want to see an Islamist government in Somalia for all ethnic Somalis.
These nationalist camps are championed by pragmatic, seasoned Somali leaders
who do not want to see Somalis become the cannon fodder of an abstract and
cosmic foreign ideology, nor do they want to see al-Qaida or its affiliated
al-Shabaab organization undermine their chance of political primacy in
Somalia,” Braniff said.
In contrast to the Taliban, which at a certain point fought for al-Qaida,
and according to some analysts, is merging in part with it, the nationalist
Islamists in Somalia share their training infrastructure with al-Shabaab for
pragmatic reasons.
“If al-Shabaab is seen as a liability moving forward, however, these
erstwhile benefactors will not feel obliged to continue hosting Shabaab if
they are strong enough to desist,” Braniff said.
Getting local: Somali Islamist movements
Talking to ISN Security Watch, Michael A Weinstein, professor at Purdue
University in the US state of Indiana, makes clear that al-Shabaab can not
be seen as a unit: “It is, after all, a Somali group and shares the standard
characteristics of Somali political groups (decentralization), although it
is more ideologically coherent than its competitors.”
While it is difficult to determine with certainty the leadership structure,
one thing appears to be clear: “It is not a top-down, hierarchical
organization with a predictable chain of command. Wherever the group is
dominant, its local leaders have a great deal of latitude and have alliances
with local sub-clans,” Weinstein said.
Overall, al-Shabaab represents a rather complex picture - therein resembling
the current state of Somalia itself, which is a country in open conflict
between factions of armed Islamist opposition groups, Islamists outside the
armed opposition with their own militias, clan families, sub-clans, regional
power centers, micro-political interests at the local level, legitimate and
criminal business interests, and the Transitional Federal Government as just
one armed actor among many others.
Al-Shabaab has a clan dimension - its western wing is aligned with the
Rahanweyne, its eastern wing with the Hawiye and Darod - but its ideology of
transnational jihad and pan-Islamism is fairly well fixed for Somali
standards.
According to Weinstein, al-Shabaab’s western and eastern branches have
different agendas: “The western branch, centered in the Rahanweyne regions
of Bay and Bakool, is associated with Sheikh Mukhtar Robow’s strategy of
consolidation and building functioning authorities as a prelude to extension
of Islamist emirates. The eastern branch, extending to the Jubba regions to
the south and through the central regions, especially Middle Shabelle, to
the north, is led by Sheikh Godane with a more militant transnationalist
agenda, although I believe the greatest concentration is on Somalia.”
Besides al-Shabaab, the other important Islamist movement on a regional
level is Hizbul Islam. It represents the usual Somali movement: It has been
and remains nationalist, and is a coalition of resistance groups based on
clan membership, in particular Darod Ogaden (Ras Kambooni Group), Darod
(Muskar Anole Group) and Hawiye (the faction dominated by Sheikh Aweys).
With the exception of the Ras Kambooni Group, the only transnational design
concerns the Ethiopian Ogaden region.
Looking for a trigger
In any case, the increased movements of young members of the Somali diaspora
to fight in their country of origin have to be put into context. Most of the
20 Americans joined al-Shabaab in 2007 and 2008 when Somalia’s ‘Christian’
archenemy Ethiopia invaded and subsequently occupied the country with US
encouragement and logistical help.
Al-Shabaab was perceived as the only resistance force willing and able to
confront the Ethiopian military, thereby developing a large domestic
constituency as well as strong support from the diaspora. With the Ethiopian
troop withdrawal, this polarizing effect of foreign occupation led to
diminished grievances, making it ever more difficult for al-Shabaab to
motivate members of the diaspora to join their fight.
David H Shinn, former State Department coordinator for Somalia during the
UNOSOM intervention and now professor at the George Washington University,
told ISN Security Watch that he thinks “this recruitment activity may have
peaked in the Somali diaspora of western countries.”
Looking at the self-regulating power of the clans, Shinn points out that
“the families of these young men now understand the threat to their
children, and they are paying closer attention to the problem.”
In any case, according to Braniff, a strong rationale based on cost benefit
analysis might prevent al-Shabaab from terror attacks abroad, referring to
the large Somali diaspora: “Remittances provide 10 times the income than
does the next closest industry in Somalia, so the world's largest
humanitarian crisis would be infinitely worse should foreign governments
prevent Somali communities from sending money back home. As a result, any
nationalist actor would have to be willing to risk societal suicide should
they decide to attack western interests directly.”
If true, this might be an indicator that fighters coming from the Somali
diaspora - who are still small in numbers compared to those from ongoing
conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan - might rather resemble the men that
fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and returned home after 1989. Although
several were identified of those who started military activity again in
their homelands, most just reverted to their civilian life.
In spite of this, there might be an intrinsic dynamic directly linked to the
attention the conflict in Somalia gets in the context of the global war on
terror and the motivation of foreigners to sacrifice their lives for a
higher cause in Somalia.
As Roland Marchal, senior research fellow at the National Center of
Scientific Research in Paris, points out to ISN Security Watch, “[there is]
also missing an international attention to Somalia that would provide a
reward for foreigners to get involved in Somalia. The success of [Somalia
becoming a training ground for jihadists] will be limited up to the time
Somalia becomes the place for a major confrontation against the West.”
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Georg-Sebastian Holzer is an analyst and free-lance journalist. He focuses
in particular on conflict dynamics in the wider Horn of Africa.
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