Islamists target Somalis in terror campaign

Islamists target white aid workers

 

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Alex Strick van Linschoten in Mogadishu

 

When Ibrahim Saeed Abdullah saw a neighbour’s cinema burnt down by a barrage of grenades, he realised that he had no choice but to heed the death threats he had received from the big men with guns in their hands and hatred in their hearts. Last week he closed the doors of his own cinema for the last time.

 

It was two years since Abdullah had opened for business in Mogadishu, the largely ruined capital of war-torn Somalia. The location may have been inauspicious but the timing seemed right: the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamist coalition that briefly took over much of the country in 2006, had just been driven out by an American-backed Ethiopian invasion.

 

In recent months, however, Al-Shabab, the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union, has spread renewed fear through Mogadishu, a city of up to 3m people that has been convulsed by fighting for 17 years.

 

Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Al-Shabab does not approve of the showing of films.

 

Soon Abdullah’s cinema was the last one standing in Mogadishu and he was threatened repeatedly. “They came with weapons, surrounded my cinema and told me, ‘We will kill you if you don’t close’,” he said.

 

Al-Shabab, now an autonomous rebel group which has added an explosive element to the combustible mix of Mogadishu’s militias, enforces strict sharia (Islamic law) and uses tactics imported from the global jihadi movement. As in Afghanistan, those who work or trade with the government risk being branded as spies or collaborators and beheaded as a warning to others.

 

Members of Al-Shabab deliver “night letters” to businessmen and others they wish to intimidate. One such letter listed “traitors assisting the occupiers who attacked the country” and warned of action if they did not make amends in 48 hours.

 

The group has overrun at least eight towns this year and taken control of large swathes of Mogadishu. It is behind a spate of roadside bombings directed at convoys of Ethiopian troops.

 

Journalists are routinely harassed. Editors and broadcasters received a letter from Al-Shabab last week instructing them to stop referring to the government and to say “puppets” instead. They were told to call dead insurgents “martyrs”.

 

The government’s writ does not run far and the Ethiopian forces propping it up are widely loathed. They come under attack as soon as they leave their heavily fortified bases. Meanwhile, some militias regarded as pro-government have received no wages for months and are switching their loyalties to whoever pays them.

 

Mogadishu is at the epicentre of the anarchy. The threats posed by rival militias mean that to travel in the city is to be in constant fear of ambush or bombing.

 

My photographer Philip Poupin and I experienced a hold-up at a government checkpoint five miles from the city centre. A group of perhaps 20 heavily armed men with a flat-bed truck and a large antiaircraft gun mounted on it pointed their rifles and ordered us out of our vehicle.

 

Our armed guards scuffled with them but were easily overpowered. The confrontation was eventually calmed by our translator and our guards’ guns were handed back, but it was a reminder of the risks that foreigners face in Somalia.

 

In February a roadside bomb killed three people working for Médecins Sans Frontières, forcing the aid organisation to withdraw all its international staff. Last month Murray Watson, 69, a British flood prevention expert, was kidnapped by six gunmen in the south of the country. He and a Kenyan colleague are still missing.

 

Two Somali-born Britons who had returned to build a school in the town of Baladwayne were shot dead by rebels with links to Al-Shabab. Last week the group announced that it would target all white people in Somalia.

 

Meanwhile, the country is witnessing what United Nations officials have called “Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis”. Some aid workers estimate the number displaced at well over 1m.

 

In Mogadishu, two Red Cross-funded hospitals have treated 1,112 casualties this year, a third of them women and children.

 

At the city’s Medina hospital nearly all the patients had been caught up in the haphazard violence. Ahmed Dalal, the uncle of six children recovering there, described how two mortar shells had hit his house, killing the children’s mother. Many people have been killed by Ethiopian troops who responded to rebel attacks by shelling entire districts.

 

South of Mogadishu are the camps for internally displaced refugees. These makeshift huts and shelters fashioned from twigs and cardboard boxes spread along both sides of the road for 15 miles towards the town of Afgoye.

 

Ahmed Osman and his wife Khadija Yusuf were rebuilding their tiny shelter with branches they had gathered. “It had almost fallen down and it will rain soon. We can’t afford any plastic sheets,” Ahmed said. Khadija added there was little chance of it being safe for them to return to Mogadishu.

 

American diplomats still hold out hope that the government will be able to hold elections next year. But they fear that Somalia could become a terrorist hub in east Africa and are concerned by links between Al-Shabab and Al-Qaeda.

 

Most of Al-Shabab’s senior members were bodyguards to foreign Al-Qaeda operatives in Somalia during the 1990s and display a powerful streak of antiAmericanism.

 

Aden Hashi Ayro, one of its leaders, was killed with 24 others in a predawn US airstrike on his home in Dhusa Mareb, several hundred miles north of the capital earlier this month. Ayro, Al-Shabab’s military commander who was trained in Afghanistan, had been blamed for the deaths of at least 10 foreigners, including Kate Peyton, a BBC news producer, who was killed outside her hotel in Mogadishu in 2005.

 

Ayro’s assassination provoked a furious response from Al-Shabab, which called for revenge against all foreigners. “This incident will cause a lot of problems to US interests in the region,” said Mukhtar Robow Adumansur, an Al-Shabab spokesman.

 

Last week Al-Shabab fighters seized a police headquarters and attacked two Ethiopian military convoys.

 

Ahmad Abdisalam, Somalia’s deputy prime minister, said he believed the only hope of a solution to the country’s problems was through local dialogue. “We need to reduce the internationalisation of the conflict,” he said.

 

However, at the Americans’ insistence, Al-Shabab has been excluded from the peace talks, which are being held in Djibouti between the government and the Islamic Courts Union.

 

Talk of peace means little to most Somalis. At a government checkpoint, a young boy stood guard last weekend. He said he was 17, but looked closer to 12 or 13, and had been working there for a year. Paid about £25 a month, he said he had signed up to support his mother, father and three brothers. I asked what he saw himself doing in a few years’ time but he did not grasp the question. He replied that he had been in many battles and expected to die soon: “Everyone who does this job dies.”

 

Road to ruin

 

1991 Muhammad Siad Barre, dictator, deposed

 

1992 US Marines sent to restore order

 

1993 Two US helicopters downed in Mogadishu. US pulls out in 1994. Years of internecine warfare follow

 

June 2006 Islamic Courts Union takes control of Mogadishu

 

December 2006 Ethiopia, with US backing, invades. Islamic Courts routed

 

April 2008 US airstrike kills Aden Hashi Ayro, a leader of Al-Shabab rebels

 

Source: The Sunday Times, May 11, 2008