THERE has been a serious escalation in the fighting in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, in recent weeks after the comparative lull earlier in the year. Government forces have been trying since mid-May to dislodge rebel Islamist fighters who have taken control of most of the capital and the countryside.
More than 45 people were killed in a single day of fighting in late May, making it one of the bloodiest days the capital has seen this year. Mogadishu, already reduced to a shell of a city after a decade and a half of relentless warfare, is being further depopulated after government troops started their counteroffensive. More than 50,000 people have fled the capital and are trying to find shelter in the already overcrowded refugee camps inside the country and in Kenya.
Since the start of the new cycle of war in Somalia in 2007 following the Ethiopian occupation, around 18,000 civilians have been killed and more than a million reduced to the status of refugees. Three million Somalis subsist on emergency food handouts from international agencies.
Islamist resistance fighters had taken up arms after the Ethiopian invasion. Their successful fight had forced the United States-backed Ethiopian troops to retreat in many places.
The international community backed by the African Union (A.U.) had, in a last-ditch attempt to bring stability to the war-torn country, propped up a government headed by Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, a former leader of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which had spearheaded the struggle against the Ethiopian forces and their local warlord allies. Sheikh Sharif now heads a government that includes warlords and politicians supported by the U.S. and its closest ally in the region, Ethiopia.
The arrangement put in place after the withdrawal of the Ethiopian troops in early 2009 was never accepted by the more militant Islamist groups. The main Islamist fighting force today is Al Shabaab, which the West accuses of having links with Al Qaeda. Another umbrella group, the Hizbul Islam, has also been actively involved in the recent fighting in Mogadishu.
In the past couple of months, the Islamists have been targeting prominent individuals and senior officials connected with the new government. By early May, it had become clear that government troops along with allied militias and the 4,000-strong A.U. peacekeeping force in the capital had decided to take on the Islamist militias, which are in control of large parts of southern and central Somalia.
The A.U. peacekeepers do not have a mandate to engage in counter-insurgency measures but this could soon change as there is a consensus in the continent that the Islamists will have to be stopped in their tracks.
The current job profile of the A.U. forces in Somalia is to protect important government installations and provide security to top civilian administrators. After the steady advances made by the Shabaab militia in recent months, the A.U. has pushed the panic button.
The pan-African organisation has blamed neighbouring Eritrea for providing weapons to the Islamist forces. Eritrea and Ethiopia have been at loggerheads for more than a decade now. They even fought a bloody war over a minor border dispute. During the Bill Clinton presidency, Eritrea was one of the closest allies of Washington.
But in the past decade, Ethiopia, which is much larger than its foe and has a bigger army, has been embraced as the ally of choice by the U.S. in the so-called "war against terror" in the strategic Horn of Africa.
Tiny Eritrea, which felt short-changed by the international community, has defiantly struck an anti-American posture. A United Nations commission looking into the origins of Eritrea's war with Ethiopia had ruled in the former's favour, holding Addis Ababa responsible for sparking off the border war. But the Ethiopian government chose to ignore the U.N.
Now Eritrea is trying to make big brother Ethiopia bleed on the killing fields of Somalia. The Eritrean leadership may also be giving tacit support to the separatist fighters in the Ethiopian province of Ogaden. The people of Ogaden are also Somalis. Ethiopia and Somalia had gone to war over Ogaden in the 1970s.
In the third week of May, the A.U. called on the U.N. Security Council to apply sanctions on Eritrea. The A.U. also wants the U.N. to impose a no-fly zone and sea blockade on Somalia.
This is the first time that the A.U. has called for sanctions on a member-state. Before that, the East African regional grouping, the Inter Governmental Authority on Development (Igad), accused the Eritrean government of "instigating and financing" the fighting in Somalia. Eritrea had walked out of the group in 2007, accusing it of failing to bring peace to the region.
The Security Council has already voiced concern over the reports that Eritrea is supplying arms to the Islamist militias in Somalia "in breach of the U.N. arms embargo". The Eritrean government has denied the charges and has instead blamed the U.S. for misleading the international community.
Eritrea's Ambassador to the U.N. said that the reports of arms being supplied to those opposing the government in Mogadishu "is totally false and misleading". Isaias Afwerki, the Eritrean President, has accused the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the U.S. of smuggling in weapons into Somalia. "We don't interfere in Somalia and we don't want to see any terrorism prevail there," he told an international news agency.
But the most prominent leader of the Islamists, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, recently told the Reuters news agency that the Islamists had the support of Eritrea. "Eritrea supports us and Ethiopia is our enemy. We once helped both countries but Ethiopia did not reward us," he told the news agency.
Sheikh Aweys, whom Somalis call the "kingmaker", had recently returned to Somalia after spending more than two years in exile in Eritrea. Aweys had parted ways politically with Sheikh Sharif, the current President of Somalia, after the latter started negotiating with the Ethiopian government, soon after the fall of Mogadishu in 2007. During the brief rule of the ICU in 2007, Sharif, a schoolteacher, was chosen by Aweys to be its international face.
Aweys has refused to compromise with the moderate Islamists who are today holding important positions in the government
Source: AllAfrica.com
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