Somalia

Somalia has not had an effective central government since 1991, when the former government was toppled by clan militias that later turned on each other. For decades, generals, warlords and warrior types have reduced this once languid coastal country in Eastern Africa to rubble. Somalia remains a raging battle zone today, with jihadists pouring in from overseas, intent on toppling the transitional government.

No amount of outside firepower has brought the country to heel. Not thousands of American Marines in the early 1990s. Not the enormous United Nations mission that followed. Not the Ethiopian Army storming into Somalia in 2006. Not the current African Union peacekeepers, who are steadily wearing out their welcome.

The only time Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, was remotely quiet in recent times was for six months in 2006, when an Islamist coalition controlled the city by itself. Today, the most stable part of the country is the breakaway region of Somaliland, which recently held elections and carried out one of the Horn of Africa’s rare peaceful transfers of power, despite little help and a lack of official recognition from the outside world.

Somalia continues to be a caldron of bloodshed, piracy and Islamist radicalism. That volatile mix has spilled over its borders in recent years, but perhaps most intensely in July 2010, when bombings in Kampala, Uganda killed more than 70 civilians and shocked the entire country.

Somali Islamist insurgents — egged on, or possibly aided, by Al Qaeda — claimed responsibility for the attack. There are currently 6,000 Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers in Mogadishu, but they are struggling to beat back the Islamist fighters, who are rallying around a group called the Shabab.

On Oct. 15, 2010, fighting broke out in central Somalia between two moderate Islamist militias that the United States and others had been counting on, as part of a new strategy, to stave off the Shabab. Shortly before the clashes started, a Western aid worker was kidnapped from the same area.

The fighting was a setback to the efforts to unite various clans and local administrations to push back the Shabab, who rule much of Somalia.

Somalia’s transitional government, initially considered to be the country's best chance for stability in years, is faring poorly. Feckless and divided, it is holed up in a hilltop palace in Mogadishu, unable to deliver services, mobilize the people or provide a coherent alternative to the insurgents, who chop off hands, ban music, soccer and bras, and hold much of Somalia in a grip of fear.

The African Union peacekeepers were initially appreciated for standing up to the Shabab. Since then the peacekeepers have made enemies among the populace by shelling crowded neighborhoods in response to insurgent fire and inadvertently killing civilians.

The Transitional Government

African Union troops are in Somalia protecting the weak but internationally recognized transitional government. If the peacekeepers were not guarding the port, airport and the hilltop presidential palace called Villa Somalia, many Somalis believe the government would quickly fall. Insurgents have been attacking the peacekeepers relentlessly, often with suicide bombs.

The moderate Islamist government is headed by Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, a former high school teacher who became president in February 2009. Much of the world was counting on Sheik Ahmed to tackle piracy and beat back the spread of militant Islam, two Somali problems that have flared into major geopolitical ones.

The U.S. has shipped 40 tons of weapons to Somalia to keep Sheik Sharif's government alive. But his armed forces are like sieves. Many of his commanders still have ties to the Islamist rebels, and several government officers have conceded that a large share of the American weapons quickly slipped into rebel hands.

Sheik Ahmed rose to popularity as a neighborhood problem solver, best known for helping to form a neighborhood court to try carjackers and kidnappers. Before that, he had been a relatively unknown teacher, the grandson of a famous cleric. He is a novel politician for Somalia. Studious and reserved, he is used to carrying a compass, not a gun. He has triangulated his country's clannish politics and found something that resembles Somalia's polticial center, a blend of moderate and more strident Islamic beliefs, with the emphasis on religion, not clan.

The Struggle with the Shabab

For years, the Shabab, one of Africa's most fearsome militant Islamist groups, have been terrorizing the Somali public in their quest to turn Somalia into a seventh-century style Islamic state.

The Shabab had been a crucial part of a functioning mini-government in 2006, when an alliance of Islamic courts briefly controlled much of south-central Somalia. The Shabab's controversial religious policies were tempered then by moderate Islamists, who delivered services like neighborhood clean-ups and community policing, and as a result the whole Islamic movement won grass-roots support. In the end, the experiment lasted only six months, until Ethiopian troops, backed by American military forces, invaded and drove the Islamists underground.

That intervention failed. The Islamists returned as a fearsome guerrilla force and the Ethiopians pulled out in January 2009, setting Somalia more or less back to where it had been in 2006, with 17,000 people killed in the process (according to Somali human rights groups).

The Shabab have succeeded in internationalizing Somalia's conflict and using their jihadist dreams to draw in foreign fighters from around the globe, including the United States. The Shabab, whose name means youth in Arabic, are a mostly under-40 militia who espouse the strict Wahhabi version of Islam and are guided, according to American diplomats, by another, better-known Wahhabi group: Al Qaeda.

General Information on Somalia
Official Name: Somalia
Capital: Mogadishu (Current local time)
Government Type: No permanent national government, transitional, parliamentary federal government
Population: 9.12 million
Area: 396,221 square miles; slightly smaller than Texas
Languages: Somali (official), Arabic, Italian, English
Year of Independence: 1960

Source: The New York Times