The Kenyan military has been secretly training police officers on behalf of Somali’s fledgling transitional government in what Department of Defence spokesman Bogita Ongeri says is in line with international agreements.
The timing of the official admission by Kenya’s usually tight-lipped military is telling. It coincides with rumours widely circulating in northeastern Kenya and in Somalia itself that the Kenya Government has been recruiting fighters from among young Kenyan Somalis to help the TFG fight the Islamist threat inside Somalia.
Dismissing the reports, Mr Ongeri said “as far as we know, all those we have trained are from Somalia and were handed over to us by the TFG for training”.
“The Kenyan military has not done anything outside the UN and AU frameworks of assisting Somalia as a country to achieve peace and tranquillity. Kenya was to chip in by training the Somali police. We will continue to train them,” he told Africa Insight.
The location of the training remains secret for “security reasons”. According to Mr Ongeri, the Kenyan military had not received any complaints from any Kenyan parent that their son was recruited to be trained as a Somali police officer or to play any other role in the conflict that has raged for nearly two decades.
The commander of Somali military forces, General Yusuf Dhumal, told reporters in Mogadishu last Thursday that Somalia and Kenya are cooperating in efforts to recruit potential soldiers for the Somali government from Kenya’s northeastern region.
The general said that 1,500 Kenyan men have been recruited and are being trained at camps in Kenya to fight Islamist rebels in Somalia. He says the recruiting effort is part of the Somali government’s plan to build a strong army that can defend the country.
But Mr Ongeri said if at all there is any Kenyan who may have lied on his nationality to enrol for the police training, if discovered, will be discontinued and punished.
Human Rights Watch had accused Kenya of backing the recruitment of Somali refugees at United Nations camps in northeastern Kenya to fight for the Somali army against militant Islamist insurgents in a report released this week.
But Somalia’s Prime Minister Omar Sharmarke dismissed the Human Rights Watch report. “We never recruited in Kenya,” Mr Sharmarke said. On his part, Mr Ongeri dismissed the claim as “propaganda’’. “We are not involved in any such operation,” he was quoted as saying in the Human Rights Watch report.
A month ago, Kenya’s Defence Minister Yusuf Hajj said leaders from North Eastern Province had received unconfirmed reports that Al-Shabaab was targeting Kenyan youth for training but that there was no conclusive evidence to show the same.
However, the leaders – MPs and sheikhs from the vast province – did not just dismiss the unconfirmed reports but launched a campaign to ask their youth to desist from falling to extremist teachings and tendencies associated with some militia groups in Somalia.
It is noteworthy that the Kenyan military are the ones conducting training for Somalis who are meant to be police officers. Kenya has for long borne the brunt of an unstable Somalia with proliferation of small arms that have been used to push Kenyan law enforcers to the limits.
That notwithstanding, the likelihood that these personnel trained by the Kenyan military will be inducted by the hard-pressed TFG into paramilitary duties cannot have escaped the Kenyan trainers. But it’s a matter squarely in the hands of the TFG.
The TFG has not disclosed where exactly it trains its troops. But this month, it emerged that Djibouti was one of the countries that conduct training when the first batch of trainee soldiers estimated at 500 were received at the Villa Somalia, the presidential palace in Mogadishu.
According to Radio Garowe, which broadcasts from Puntland, French military advisers assisted in the training. Some of the freewheeling Somali blogs claim that Sudan, Uganda, Burundi and Ethiopia are assisting the TFG with military training, but the reports have not been confirmed.
Whereas the extent of Al-Shabaab’s possible penetration into northern Kenya remains unclear, the reach of the Islamists’ recruitment outside their homeland appears to be extensive. The TFG itself has repeatedly circulated reports of fighters allied to Al-Shabaab trickling in from Yemen, the Persian Gulf and even Pakistan.
Ethnic Somalis driven to join the Islamists have been uncovered coming from as far away as Minnesota in the US. However, it is the reported presence of so-called international jihadists with links to Al-Qaeda that the US and Somalia’s secular neighbours are particularly alarmed about.
This is the element believed to have introduced into the Somali conflict the signature jihadist method of suicide bombing. Last month, such a suicide attack targeted premises occupied by AU peacekeeping troops in Mogadishu and resulted in several fatalities.
In the same month, a Kenyan fugitive accused of Al-Qaeda links, Ali Saleh Nabhan, was killed in a helicopter attack staged by US special forces in southern Somalia. The circumstances that prevailed at the time the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) were scoring their successes in Somalia are markedly different from those Al-Shabaab and its allies are encountering presently.
Though in most cases the same militias who fought for the ICU are the same ones who reconstituted themselves into the ranks of the Al-Shaabab insurgency, the ICU had a more coherent programme of extending civil order among the population and were able to win popular support for being a bulwark against the hated clan warlords of old.
Thus, the ICU was able to rapidly entrench its authority in much of Somalia and to wrest control of the capital Mogadishu before the Ethiopians intervened in December 2006 and crushed them militarily. Despite the air of invincibility Al-Shabab’s hold is limited to south and parts of central Somalia. Control over Mogadishu – the biggest prize – remains stalemated between the Islamists and TFG forces.
The all-important port of Mogadishu still remains in the hands of the TFG. The Islamist front in Somalia has actually been significantly weakened by open differences between Al-Shabaab and their chief ally Hizbul Islam. These differences recently degenerated into brutal gunfights in Kismayu.
The control of Kismayu is critical for the levying of port taxes which the militias appropriate. It is also crucial as the entry point of clandestine shipments of weapons needed by the Islamists. Analysts do not discount further fragmentation within the Islamist ranks, especially if the overall situation in Somalia continues to be a stalemate and the international community remains steadfast in ensuring the TFG does not collapse.
They believe that the strategy is to keep the TFG standing with the hope that Al-Shabaab will lose steam and fragment as the deadlock persists.
Source: Daily Nation, Oct 24, 2009