Friday, November 22, 2013
The United Nations has approved plans for
the African Union to build up its peacekeeping force in Somalia to more
than 22,000 troops, to support the shaky Western-backed government
against Islamist militants who refuse to quit their guerrilla war
despite recent setbacks.The buildup of the AU force, known as Amisom,
could end up stoking violence rather than lessening it because it's
likely the reinforcements will include troops from Ethiopia, widely
reviled across the Horn of Africa country for its U.S.-backed invasion
in 2006 that toppled a short-lived Islamist government.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
warned in October "military gains against al-Shabaab that have been
achieve in recent years are at serious risk of being reversed" as the
Islamists regroup and mount large-scale attacks, including suicide
bombings in Somalia's war-battered capital Mogadishu.
Al-Shabaab
-- it means "the Youth" in Arabic -- was driven out of Mogadishu and
other major Somali cities over the last two years by Amisom, heavily
reinforced with Kenyan and Ethiopian forces, but it retains control of
large areas of the countryside.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies
in London estimates al-Shabaab currently comprises 7,000-9,000 active
fighters, "a significant reduction from a May 2011 estimated of 15,000.
The movement is controlled by hard-line jihadists, led by Afghan War veteran Ahmed Abdi Godane after an internal power struggle.
It's
showing no sign of scaling back its operations, despite an abortive
U.S. Navy SEALS attempt in October to capture top al-Shabaab leader
Abdulkadir Mohamed Abdulkadir, a Kenyan of Somali origin known as
"Ikrima."
It's also widened its war against Kenya, Uganda,
Ethiopia and other regional African states that contribute troops to
Amisom, which has not been a peacekeeping force for some time but a
strike force tasked with crushing the Islamist alliance of Somali clans.
These
groups have been fighting each other in an ever-changing sequence of
tribal alliances since Somali warlords toppled the dictatorship of Gen. Mohamed Said Barre in 1991, the last fully functioning central government the country has had.
The
poorly led military forces of the transitional federal government of
recently elected President Hassan Sheik Mohamud are unable to cope with
al-Shabaab on their own and are totally dependent on the AU force and
its firepower.
Al-Shabaab has unleashed a campaign of guerrilla
warfare, avoiding set-piece battles with Amisom, and widened its
campaign with bombings in the countries of Mohamud's African allies.
The
most savage of these was the Sept. 21 attack by a four-man cell on the
Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, in which as many as
94 people, including the attackers, are reported to have been killed
during a four-day siege.
In Ethiopia, like Kenya a largely
Christian country, four people were killed Nov. 6 when a bomb exploded
in a minibus in the western Segno Gebaya region, possibly as they were
transporting a bomb.
Ethiopian security authorities said two weeks
earlier that two Somali suicide bombers accidentally blew themselves up
in a house in Addis Ababa, the country's capital, while preparing to
attack soccer fans during Ethiopia's World Cup qualifying match against
Nigeria.
Ethiopia has been plagued by terrorist attacks by
insurgent groups such as the Oromo Liberation Front and the Ogaden
National Liberation Front for years, but none of the factions have
employed suicide attacks.
If the Ethiopian account is accurate,
the plot bore an eerie similarity to al-Shabaab's deadly attack on
Kampala, Uganda's capital, July 11, 2010, in which 74 people were
slaughtered in coordinated bombings against crowds watching the World
Cup final on giant satellite TV screens.
These and other attacks
have raised the specter of Christian-Muslim conflict across East Africa.
Sectarian violence has recently been reported in Tanzania as al-Qaida
groups and their offshoots extend their operations across north and west
Africa.
Although Western security experts remain doubtful about
al-Shabaab's tradecraft and ability to carry out sophisticated terrorist
attacks far from its operational center, the U.S. global security
consultancy Stratfor observed that the Addis Ababa incident underlined
the group's determination "to act on threats they have made against the
countries with troops in Somalia.
"Three years separated the
Kampala attack and the Westgate Mall attack, but only a month passed
between the Westgate attack and the explosion in Addis Ababa, indicating
that al-Shabaab appears to have increased the tempo of its attacks
outside Somalia."