The Somali Taliban

Militants from the radical group al-Shabab practise exercises in Somalia

For nineteen years, the Somali capital Mogadishu has been a “virtual no-go zone” of civil war. And it is becoming an increasingly important base of radical Islam. Writing for The Guardian, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reported from Somalia on “the world’s invisible conflict” which sees the Islamist government of Sharif Ahmed locked in “an attritional struggle” with al-Shabab: an even more radical group now established as “the Somali franchise of al-Qaida”.

Al-Shabab’s version of sharia law “makes the Taliban seem moderate” and Somalia is “fast becoming the favoured destination for wannabe jihadis,” wrote Abdul-Ahad. The group is funded by various wealthy Yemenis, American Arabs, Africans and expatriate Somali Europeans. And the increased presence of US drones whining over Mogadishu reveals Western fears about the direction in which the country is heading. President Ahmed now “rules only over a hilltop compound” and his government, wrote Abdul-Ahad, is “on the verge of collapse.”

A report for Bloomberg by Sudarsan Raghavan showed that the links between al-Shabab and the Taliban are not just comparative. According to Raghavan, “foreign fighters trained in Afghanistan are gaining influence inside Somalia’s al-Shabab militia, fueling a radical Islamist insurgency with ties to Osama bin Laden.” These “foreigners” include Pakistanis, Arabs and a “significant number of Americans”, including two men from New Jersey, Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte, arrested in New York on Sunday and charged with planning to join al-Shabab in Somalia.

Rahavan also noted that al-Shabab’s main rival, Hezb-i-Islam (a group also locked in the civil war) has “proclaimed bin Laden welcome”. He continued: “The rise of the foreign fighters suggests a growing internationalization of the conflict, part of a trend emerging from Yemen to Mali, where al-Qaeda’s regional affiliates are showing increasing ambitions nearly a decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

And the dire state of Mogadishu was also underlined by a report for Kenya’s Irin News which found an “alarming increase in the number of mental health patients” in the Somali capital. “[T]he single biggest contributing factor is the conflict,” Abdiaziz Mohamed Warsame, the only practising psychiatrist in Mogadishu and professor at Benadir University, told the paper. Warsame said that most of the city’s residents had been displaced “more than a dozen times” and that “many hundreds, maybe even thousands” of people with serious mental health problems are being hidden by their families.

Source: periscopepost.com