Elliot&Holzer 2009 The Invention of Terrorism in Somalia

South African Journal of International Affairs
Vol. 16, No. 2, August 2009, 215244
The invention of ‘terrorism’ in Somalia: paradigms and policy in US

foreign relations
Ashley Elliot* and Georg-Sebastian Holzer
Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, USA
The article first traces events in Somalia since 9/11: the rise of the Islamic Courts,
the Ethiopian occupation, the recalibration of the interim government and the al-
Shabaab insurgency. A second layer of analysis brings into focus three fluctuations
in the external perception of the Somali crisis: (i) a post-Cold War narrative of
‘state-building’; (ii) the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’; and (iii) a reloaded vision of
‘state-building-as-counterterrorism’. Such models inform US policy, yet their
roots lie in an Anglo-Saxon intellectual edifice, detached from the Somali context.
Nomothetic fallacies over US political agency encourage paradigms to linger long
after the facts have failed them * a disjuncture brought to light most visibly
during the second term of the Bush administration. In this period, the unrealities
of the ‘war on terror’ were refracted instrumentally by local actors in the Horn of
Africa, creating a web of distorting friend-enemy distinctions. While the Obama
administration is less devoted than its predecessor to imagining an opponent in
Somalia, it too has misread the core political logic. The article explores how this
dissonance between external perception and local reality creates difficulties for
post-interventionary states, whose politicians must win favour in Washington in
the knowledge that favour alone cannot ensure political survival * and may
subvert domestic attempts to secure it.
Keywords: Somalia; Horn of Africa; US foreign policy; Shabaab; Wahhabism;
Sufism; political Islam; terrorism; state-building; conflict resolution
Introduction
When the new Somali president, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, met with US Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton in Nairobi in August 2009, the well publicised handshake
affirmed an unlikely revival of fortune for the former school teacher and Sufi spiritual
leader. Over the second half of 2006, Sheikh Sharif had led the Islamic Courts Union
(ICU) * a movement that included a radical youth wing, the Shabaab, which in
Clinton’s public estimation was seeking a ‘haven for global terrorism’ in Somalia.1 The
question is why, over a short period, was Sheikh Sharif elevated from wanted adversary
to Washington’s most ardent hope for a solution to the Somali crisis?
Sheikh Sharif’s tenure as leader of the Islamic Courts was short-lived. By January
2007, the ICU leadership was fleeing the advance of Ethiopian forces. Avoiding the
US air strikes that accompanied the Ethiopian invasion, Sheikh Sharif reached the
Kenyan border on 21 January and came under arrest. From Nairobi, he travelled first
to Yemen and later to Djibouti where his hastily constructed opposition faction, the
Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (Djibouti wing), entered a unity
*Corresponding author. Email: aelliot08@johnshopkins.it
ISSN 1022-0461 print/ISSN 1938-0275 online

# 2009 The South African Institute of International Affairs
DOI: 10.1080/10220460903268984
http://www.informaworld.com
216 A Elliot and G-S Holzer
government with the moribund Transitional Federal Government (TFG). In

December 2008, Sheikh Sharif returned to Somalia to implement the Djibouti
agreement and on 31 January 2009 was sworn in as the country’s new interim
president.
On 2 February 2009, President Ahmed, whose associates have included some of
Washington’s elusive ‘al-Qaeda suspects,’ travelled to Ethiopia to attend an African
Union Summit. So recently hunted by the Ethiopian Defense Forces, President
Ahmed was greeted warmly in Addis Ababa as a partner in the effort to reorient a
peace process that had failed, in one form or another, some 15 times since 1991. And
as the high-profile meeting in Kenya later confirmed, his refashioned interim
government had acquired the full backing of the United States.
Amidst this rapid rehabilitation, President Ahmed’s own political vision remained
an enigma. On 10 March 2009, in an attempt to reach out or co-opt the Shabaab, his
new Cabinet voted in favour of implementing sharia law in Somalia.2 In the same
month, President Ahmed promised international donors his government would
combat ‘terrorism’ and support human rights, gender equality and civil society. Since
then he has visited Europe, the Middle East and five states in the Horn of Africa. The
new Somali president is thus juggling two quite separate impulses * the pursuit of
domestic legitimacy through a shift toward Islamism and co-optation, and the need to
obtain international support against an ascendant insurgency, secured through
opposition to radical Islamism. As the government is struggling even to defend the
few Mogadishu suburbs it controls, each of these imperatives comprises a very pressing
reason of state. Succeeding in only one will not suffice. The difficulty for President
Ahmed is that the different degrees of Islamism, from ‘moderate’ to ‘extremist’, are
categories defined by the various and jostling departments of the US government *
they belong to a normative vocabulary he is powerless to affect.
In this way, the Somali case provides an illuminating aperture into the difficulties
confronting politicians in weak post-interventionary states. The preference of those
who sponsor intervention is for arrangements that keep power in the hands of an
internationally controllable and nationally controlling political class.3 This political
class must win favour in western capitals but such favour alone cannot ensure political
survival * and may subvert domestic attempts to secure it. The military power of the
United States is supreme but its reach is limited and where it is exercised, resentment
breeds. It is a conundrum that plays out from Baghdad to Kabul (where President
Karzai saw his attempt in April 2009 to pass harsh Islamic laws vetoed in
Washington);4 yet the conjuncture of events and its subordinate position in geopolitics
makes Somalia an absorbing case. Because the Somali perspective is rarely aired, the
effect is magnified.
The first purpose of this article is, accordingly, to ‘reverse the image’ from the main
body of research on Somalia (which follows a US-centric policy-evaluative or policy-
prescriptive approach), in order to bring the difficulties confronting the post-
interventionary Somali state squarely into focus. The article focuses on the war-
ravaged southern and central Somalia, although the analysis roves freely into the
narrative of Somalia’s two additional political trajectories * the fragile peace in
Puntland and the nascent democracy in Somaliland. The article’s second theme, which
elaborates on the difficulty for Somali politicians in reconciling international with
domestic legitimacy, is to offer a sense of how and why external actors have misread the
dynamics of the Somali conflict. Two external analytical frames * one as old as
Somalia’s own statelessness, the other more recent * have been prominent. We label
South African Journal of International Affairs 217
these interpretations the ‘War on Terror’ and ‘state-building’ narratives. Both, we shall
argue, are rooted in formulas and labels abstracted from a different or generalised
political world and imposed on the Somali case without attention to context and
specificity. From among the different motors of agency and conflict in Somalia * clan,
class, nation, religion and so on * such narratives stress aspects that accord with their
assumptions and disregard others. The resulting conceptual ambiguity lacks any
historically grounded understanding of what led to chronic disorder in the Somali
polity in the first instance * a cause located not in the centrifugal clan dynamics of the
1990s but earlier, in the final decades of the Cold War. Because outside interference is
relentless and often decisive, external ideational shifts over what matters about
Somalia’s statelessness bear directly on the political landscape in the country. The
rupture between external perception and local reality carries a heavy explanatory
burden for the present situation in Somalia. Reducing it may determine what political
future is attainable.
The article has three parts. The first sketches an analytical narrative of events since
9/11; section two offers a critique of the use of ‘terrorism’ as an analytical tool in
Somalia; part three draws out the premises underlying the ‘state-building’ narrative and
puts forward an alternative. The conclusion returns to the present in order to outline future
scenarios for Somalia.
Somalia since 9/11

Since 1991, Somalia has provided a headache for international politicians, instability
for the region, and misery for many of its inhabitants. Until 11 September 2001,
analysts and policymakers discussed Somalia’s seemingly intractable problems, such as
the absence of formal government, the predation of militia-factions and the failure of
humanitarian efforts, while Islamist groups and US counterterrorism policies
remained peripheral.5 In a framework that has since been applied from Haiti to
Afghanistan, the Somali crisis came to be understood through a conceptual prism that
wedded the idea of peace-as-order to state-centric notions of institution-building and
economic development. This outlook was embodied in the first humanitarian
intervention to be authorised under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, the
ill-fated United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNISOM) from April 1992 to March
1995. Its guiding objective was to impose a monopoly on force * an external Leviathan
* on what was then and remains a state without a state.
While the vision of state-building as a solution to the Somali conflict lasted
throughout the 1990s, the United States and other states proved gradually less willing
to act on it. After 9/11, however, Somalia’s changing politics and fortunes were
increasingly surveyed through the lens of ‘terrorism’.6 Somalia became a standing
threat to international security. The country’s statelessness, it was assumed, would
provide a ‘terrorist safe haven’. Although Somalia was relatively neglected in the early
attentions of the ‘War on Terror’, the US-sanctioned Ethiopian invasion of southern
Somalia in December 2006 comprised the belated culmination of this focus.
Yet in the wake of the failure of the Ethiopian occupation, international observers
began to diminish their emphasis on international terrorism (even if, in the western
media, Somalia became the emblem for another threat: piracy).7 Even after the rise of
the radical Islamist group, the Shabaab, in 20072008 it was clear that the balance
of opinion within the various arms of the American state, latterly under the direction of
the Obama administration, had reverted to the ‘state-building’ narrative of old, this
time wedded awkwardly to the goal of counterterrorism. (This shift away from the
Bush-era strictures of the ‘War on Terror’ ideology was demonstrated in the Obama
administration’s provision of 40 tons of arms to President Ahmed’s moderate Islamist
government in the summer of 2009.)8
Thus, international apprehension over the significance of the Somali conflict
commenced, in the emboldened current of early post-Cold War interventionism, with
the idea of state-building. As this rescinded into inaction it was replaced after 2001
with a new set of imperatives anchored in the ‘War on Terror’, before returning to a
reloaded vision of state-building-as-counterterrorism under the Obama administra-
tion. In Somalia, of course, events continued. As the following analytical narrative
reveals, a dissonance emerged and widened between local reality and the fluctuations
of perception and policy in western capitals.
Somalia 20012006
The Horn of Africa witnessed few immediate changes in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.9
Somalia lacked effective central authority, as it had done since the fall of Siyaad Barre’s
regime in 1991, but it was no longer a radically violent environment. In the 1990s,
government collapse led to a bloody civil war, banditry and famine; but by 2001,
incremental improvements in local administrative capacity and economic activity
created more predictable conditions, leading some to imagine that Somalia had
reached a new phase of ‘governance without government’.10 One extraordinary change
did occur. As the majority of the world’s states remonstrated against ‘international
terrorism’, elements of Somalia’s political elite were ‘queuing up to declare their
country a potential haven for terrorists’.11 This phenomenon * one party attempting
to de-legitimise its opponents and garner international support through accusations of
‘terrorism’ * has become a vital currency of power in Somali politics since 9/11. The
new orientation among Somali actors reflected an international shift from disengage-
ment tempered by meagre multilateral efforts in the 1990s to a new agenda in which
certain states * primarily Ethiopia and the US * began actively to re-engage with
Somalia.12
In 2001, a new government was seated in the capital, Mogadishu. But the
Transitional National Government (TNG), formed at the Arta conference in Djibouti
in 1999, was stillborn: the politician’s remit confined them to the enclaves of their
Mogadishu stronghold.13 The TNG was supported by a number of African and Arab
states, especially Egypt, but opposed by the most influential external player in Somali
politics, Ethiopia. The new government was accused of favouring the interests of one
particular clan, the Hawiye, and the interests of certain Islamist groups. In response,
the Ethiopian government backed a constellation of aggrieved factions to form the
Somalia Reconciliation and Restoration Council (SRRC). The SRRC quickly began
smearing the TNG and its supporters by accusing them of ties with ‘extremist’ groups
such as Al-Itihaad.14
While not suffering a comprehensive military defeat, the TNG lost momentum and
dissolved in 2003. Ethiopia’s success in undermining the nascent interim government
proved that Addis Ababa effectively exercised the power of veto over the political
direction of its disorderly neighbour. The episode led to a new conference in Kenya
designed to solve Somalia’s absence of government; the fourteenth such attempt since
1991.15 The Mbgathi peace talks, conducted under the auspices of the Intergovern-
mental Authority on Development (IGAD), eventually produced the Transitional
Federal Government in October 2004. The impotence and narrow constituency of this
new government equalled its predecessor, although its make-up differed entirely.
Ethiopia’s influence on proceedings led to claims that the TFG was merely an
Ethiopian proxy and unrepresentative of Somalia’s clans. The disposition of power
appeared to favour the interests of the Darod clan and alienate large sections of the
Hawiye. Its president, Abdillahi Yusuf, was a central figure of the SRRC, a staunch
anti-Islamist, and backed to the hilt by Ethiopia.16 Yusuf perceived that the TFG’s
support-base was too narrow to operate in Mogadishu, where the Hawiye clan
dominated.17 The president accordingly moved the government from Kenya to the
provincial Somali town of Baidoa, where it remained powerless and divided. From this
political vacuum emerged a new player, labelled by the international media the ‘Islamic
Courts’ or Islamic Courts Union.
The Islamic Courts

Islamic Courts were familiar to the Somali political landscape. In August 1999 in the
north of Mogadishu, Islamic clerics from the Abgal sub-clan of Somalia’s largest and
most powerful clan, the Hawiye, had taken advantage of the weaknesses created by
factional infighting to recruit militias and judges, backed by their own secular clan
leadership.18 The Courts were empowered by the population’s desire for a modicum
of security, and by local business groups in particular. But the experiment quickly
faltered. As the Courts grew in stature, Mogadishu’s incumbent militia leaders began
to view them as competitors and the Courts fractured under pressure along sub-clan
lines.
In 2005, conditions were more propitious. The ICU began to unite across clan
boundaries and build a significant militia force. Predictably, a group of warlords
formed to oppose this new competitor, naming itself, with magnificent ingenuousness,
the ‘Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter Terrorism’ (ARPCT).
Momentarily, southern Somalia entered a period of ‘tri-polar’ politics defined by the
rival camps of the TFG, the ARPCT and the ICU.19 But four months after its
formation, the ARPCTwas ousted by the ICU in early 2006. With astonishing rapidity,
the ICU extended their rule over Mogadishu, Kismayo and much of southern Somalia.
The Courts gained considerable performance legitimacy during this period for
delivering a level of security unmatched in Somalia in 15 years.20 For the first time
in Somalia’s independent history, Islamists were governing, not merely opposing. A
stand-off ensued as the Courts’ expansion led them into direct proximity with the TFG
in Baidoa, near the Ethiopian border. An attempt to avoid conflict was made when the
two sides were invited for talks in Khartoum in June 2006, but incentives were running
against reconciliation:
On the one hand, the [Courts] were on a military roll, and saw little need to negotiate
with an entity that it intended to defeat. On the other hand, the TFG probably would
not have survived in a compromise situation as resulting internal schisms would have
torn it apart.21
From June 2006, both sides participated in an arms race. The TFG received supplies
from Ethiopia while shipments arrived for the Courts from Asmara, the seat of the
Eritrean government, along with supplies from various Arab sponsors.22 But in the
summer and autumn of 2006, the most important battle being waged was internal.
Within the ‘big tent’ of the Courts movement, traditional Sufi leaders such as Sheikh
Sharif Sheikh Ahmed were jostling for power with salafists and jihadists such as the
Shabaab.23 In what remains the most poignant of Somalia’s missed opportunities, the
contest was decided in favour of the more bellicose wing.
In a country with a single language and religion, born in 1960 out of the dream of
Abden Abdullah Osman Daar for a greater Somalia for all ethnic Somalis, the Courts
were genuinely popular, successfully fusing Somali nationalism with Islamism. For
some, including many in the diaspora, the movement was an alternative to the zero-
sum game of clannism; for others, it presented a useful vehicle for clan interests.24 Had
the moderates prevailed, the Courts may have reached a compromise with Ethiopia;
but with the radicalisation of the leadership a new cycle of violence was unavoidable.
In late 2006, the Courts began a series of sporadic assaults on TFG positions
around Baidoa. This proved a serious miscalculation of the hardliners: after six months
in power, the Courts were gone within 10 days.25 On 24 December, the Ethiopian army
engaged with the Courts with token support from the TFG. In a lightning offensive,
Ethiopian forces killed an estimated 1000 Courts militiamen in the open countryside.26
Defeat turned into rout when the Courts opted for retreat to the southern port city of
Kismayo over the use of asymmetrical guerrilla tactics in the defence of Mogadishu.
Kismayo’s residents soon expelled the Courts, whose members fled south toward the
Kenyan border, allowing Ethiopian and TFG forces to wrest nominal control over all
of southern Somalia.27
In January 2007, invasion settled into occupation. A new political vacuum
threatened to emerge as the weak TFG struggled to consolidate its authority in
Mogadishu. President Yusuf quickly came to rely on Ethiopian protection and an
initial African Union peacekeeping contingent of 1700 Ugandan troops under the UN-
sanctioned African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM).28 Other AU membership
states balked at the prospect of sending further troops. The TFG’s power was derived
from Ethiopian midwifery, yet a violent history of irredentist grievance and border
wars guaranteed opposition to the Ethiopian presence.29
Insurgency and external intervention

Within weeks of the invasion, an insurgency against TFG and Ethiopian forces
gathered momentum. The turbulent new dispensation attracted greater attention
from international actors. In January 2007, al-Qaeda deputy, Ayman al-Zawahir,
posted an internet message encouraging the Courts to launch a campaign of suicide
bombings against the Ethiopians.30 And the United States, for whom memory of the
messy UNISOM mission had cautioned against intervention in the wake of 9/11,
intervened once more. On 6 January 2007, as the Courts militia fled Mogadishu, the
US launched the first of a series of air-strikes in Somalia against suspected al-Qaeda
militants. (The suspicion proved false: those killed were innocents or simply rank-
and-file Islamist fighters. Only later, in May 2008, could the United States claim any
success, killing the Shabaab leader Aden Hashi Ayro in the town of Dusamareb.)31
The projection of the ‘War on Terror’ in the Horn provided justification for the
United States to militarise its policy in the region. (It has witnessed less success
elsewhere in Africa, as demonstrated by the rejection in 2008 to host the United
States African Command, or AFRICOM, by every African country except Liberia.)
These air strikes brought America back to centre-stage in Somalia. Their publicity
and timing wedded US policy to the Ethiopian occupation in the Somali imagination
* a conflation that continues to undermine US legitimacy in the region.32
Whether US support was the determining factor in the Ethiopian decision to

invade is disputed. Two weeks prior to the invasion, then US Assistant Secretary
Jendayi Frazer labelled the Courts leadership as ‘extremists . . . controlled by al-Qaeda
cell individuals’, thus shifting State Department policy very publicly away from
mediation.33 The decision to remove the ICU from power may have been taken in
Addis Ababa, but it was surely made possible only by American assent: ‘how could
Ethiopia, with a budget 50 per cent dependent on international aid, afford a military
sortie of this size without (US) backing?’34
Conditions in Mogadishu have historically provided an accurate barometer of
stability in Somalia. By April 2007, Mogadishu was engulfed in the most intense
fighting since 19911993 as approximately 20 000 Ethiopian troops, backed by 5000
Somali government soldiers, confronted a coalition of Hawiye clan militia, jihadists,
Islamic Courts remnants, nationalistic fighters and opportunists in a conflict whose
battle lines were re-drawn daily across the city.35
Whole neighbourhoods were shelled, producing civilian casualties estimated to exceed
1,000 . . . Between 200,000 and 300,000 thousand residents were displaced . . . In some
neighbourhoods in north Mogadishu, eye-witnesses estimate that as many as one in
three structures have been damaged or destroyed.36
In April 2007, an estimated 600 refugees died of cholera and other diseases on the
outskirts of the capital as a growing legion of internally displaced people (IDPs)
spread into the Afgooye corridor in the lower Shabelle region. President Yusuf
promised a national reconciliation conference for 16 April, but later postponed the
negotiations indefinitely.37 Meanwhile, the repeated shelling of urban areas by
Ethiopian forces led one high-ranking European Union (EU) security official to warn
the head of the EU delegation to Somalia that continued support to the TFG may
implicate the EU in war crimes.38
As the insurgency hardened in late 2007 and early 2008 into a cycle of asymmetric
attacks and rural land grabs, the TFG showed little aptitude for improving on the
conditions of its violent birth. Following the resignation of Prime Minister Ali
Mohamed Gedi on 29 October and the inability of his successor, Nur Hassan Hussuin,
to form a new cabinet, the government threatened to fracture along clan lines.39
President Yusuf ignored political reality * his government actively ruled perhaps 5%
of Somali territory * by refusing to negotiate with the insurgents.
In early 2008, Mogadishu witnessed a spike in insurgent attacks. The nature of the
insurgency also shifted. In mid-March, three Somali soldiers were beheaded by
insurgents. This followed the earlier introduction of suicide bombings against
Ethiopian forces, AU forces, and Somali government soldiers.40 By the end of 2008,
insurgent attacks had become more sophisticated and ambitious, with the use of
improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and a level of co-ordination hitherto unseen in
Somalia.
The Djibouti Agreement

Yet by the end of 2008, the political deadlock within the TFG began to ease when on
29 December the unpopular 75-year old president, Abdillahi Yusuf, formerly
announced his resignation, citing his desire not to be seen as an ‘obstacle to peace’
in Somalia.41 The Djibouti peace process followed, culminating in January 2009 with
the promise of an Ethiopian withdrawal, the formation of a new government and an
expansion of the parliament by 275 seats in order to combine existing representatives

with a number of former ICU (now Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia, or
ARS) members.42
Oddly, the danger posed by the Shabaab helped facilitate the rapprochement
between the ARS and the interim government. With the threat of the radical Shabaab
seizing power in Somalia, the position of the ARS as a moderate opposition in exile,
with no real power on the ground in Somalia, was no longer tenable. And perhaps
more ironically, the conditions of the Djibouti peace deal, which doubled the size of
parliament to 550 in a country of just 8 million, ultimately allowed Sharif Ahmed to
win the presidency.43 Among the new MPs added were 200 from the ARS, Sharif’s
principle constituency, thus tipping the vote in his favour.
On 27 January 2009, the new Transitional Federal Parliament adopted a resolution
to amend the Transitional Federal Charter to extend its mandate for two years, until
August 2011.44 This was followed two weeks later on 13 March by the inaugural session
of the newly enlarged parliament, the first to be held in the capital since the formation
of the TFG at Mbgathi.45 The new government immediately turned its attention to
security. The Djibouti process provided for the creation of three key institutions: the
Joint Security Committee, the Joint Security Force and the Somali Peace Force.46
Western governments agreed to provide $213 million to set up a 6000-strong army and
a police force of 10 000,47 but the intensity of the Shabaab-led insurgency stalled the
efforts of the interim government, rendering the new security apparatus stillborn.
Despite the optimism surrounding his election, President Ahmed missed several
opportunities at Djibouti. He underestimated the antipathy his new government
excited amongst the various outliers to the process, among whom he was viewed as a
traitor. He also failed in the difficult task of reconciling the original Yusuf-era MPs
with the new ARS MPs. More decisively, his bargaining position was poorly
prepared: Ahmed failed to volunteer any concessions to the patchwork of militias *
secular and Islamist * that had taken de facto control over segments of southern
Somalia following the Ethiopian withdrawal (the last Ethiopian troops had crossed
back into Ethiopian soil on 25 January).48 This would sorely hinder the task of
securing state authority outside Mogadishu. For example,
Contacts with militant leader Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys were particularly undermined
by this ambivalence. Beyond the vague promise that the TFG and Arab governments
would push for his name to be removed from the U.S. list of foreign sponsors of
terrorism, nothing else was offered to Mr. Aweys. It was inevitable he would soon . . .
turn into a spoiler.49
President Ahmed’s timidity was also exacerbated by international hesitation over the
endorsement of particular groups. Washington proved unwilling to abide the
involvement of Somali actors whose records (in American eyes) suggested a jihadist
dint. This intransigence on behalf of the international community recalled the failure
to invite any civil or armed groups outside of the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance
leadership to the 2001 Bonn conference on Afghanistan. Just as a preoccupation with
counterterrorism blinkered western states in the founding of the post-Taliban Afghan
state, so the snubs during the Djibouti agreement guaranteed opposition to the
interim government in Somalia from groups with little a priori reason to remain as
spoilers.
Nevertheless, the new interim government showed some early signs of promise.
President Ahmed reached out to opposition groups, both directly and by proxy, and
the unity government attracted a degree of support from the population. The new
government passed a national budget and made use of legitimate tax revenue from
Mogadishu’s port to pay TFG troops. In a further boost, the government was
reinforced in March 2009 by the deployment of a fifth battalion of 850 AMISOM
troops from Uganda, bringing the overall AMISOM presence to 4300 (54% of the
mission’s mandated strength).50
The sectarian dimension

More unexpectedly still, a new force in Somali politics entered into a loose alliance
with the government to oppose the insurgency. In the Ceel Buur region of central
Somalia, a new group, Al-Sunna w’al-Jama’a, succeeded in expelling the Shabaab
from several towns.51 In January 2009, in the Galgaduud region, for example, the Al-
Sunna wa-al-Jamaa engaged Al-Shabaab militias, reportedly killing 35.52 The
movement comprises Sufi students and adherents * a group with no previous
history of political or military action in Somalia * who oppose the radical Shabaab
interpretation of Islam as ‘un-Islamic’ and ‘un-Somali.’ Somalia’s conflict has thus
entered an ideological phase * a new contest over the relation of religion to Somali
statehood.
Stalemate: the equilibrium of 2009

The wider outlook remains bleak, however. Popular support for the insurgency may
be waning; for example, following the Ethiopian withdrawal, traditional leaders of
the Mudulood, the dominant Hawiye sub-clan in Mogadishu, rejected the continua-
tion of the insurgency.53 But the politicalmilitary reality is different. The Shabaab’s
operational capacity remains strong. Somaliland’s ‘9/11’ provided an explosive
indication of this reach. On 29 October 2008, three co-ordinated suicide bombings hit
Hargeysa, the capital of the semi-autonomous republic. The bombs targeted the
Presidential Palace, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) com-
pound and the Ethiopian liaison office. Simultaneously, two offices of the Puntland
Intelligence Service (PIS) in Boosaaso, capital of the Puntland region, were hit. The
attacks were timed to coincide with a press conference in Nairobi announcing
negotiations between the TFG and ARS. This timing and choice of target reflected
the fact that radical Islamism in Somalia is wedded to a powerful notion of Somali
nationalism * set against the balkanisation of the state into three separate
republics.54
On 22 February 2009, a double suicide bombing by the Shabaab of the
Burundian AMISOM base in Mogadishu killed 11 peacekeepers and injured 28.
The organisation has also proved capable of taking and holding territory,
consolidating its presence in the lower Shabelle region, expanding further into the
Bay and Gedo regions and capturing Baidoa, the seat of the parliament, in the wake
of the Ethiopian withdrawal. A second radical Islamist group, Hizbul Islam, an
amalgam of four groups including the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia
(Asmara wing), has also emerged in alliance with the Shabaab. The group appears to
control large territories in the south-west of Somalia. Both groups have received
training or volunteers from Eritrea, Yemen, Libya, Qatar, Iran and a number of
western states.55
In the light of an emboldened insurgency, the interim government is beginning to

fray. The wave of assassinations and inflammatory rhetoric has removed the prospect
of negotiation in the near-term. Meanwhile, the government currently controls only a
portion of southern Mogadishu. In a telling indication of his own perception of the
situation, on 20 June 2009 President Ahmed called for the Kenyan and Ethiopian
governments to intervene or else risk Somalia falling to jihadism. Over the summer of
2009, in the aftermath of the assassinations of Somalia’s interior minister,
ambassador-designate to South Africa and police chief in successive suicide-
bombings, the country’s new legislators fled Mogadishu in droves.56 As many as
300 members of parliament are now abroad.57 Most recently, on 19 June, the
Shabaab killed the charismatic Somali Security Minister Omar Hashi Aden along
with 30 others.58 The government, in plaintive understatement, has called a state of
emergency.
Yet the lesson from the post 9/11 era of occupation and asymmetric opposition
across the Middle East is that an insurgency requires more than suicide bombings to
take power. In order to rule, any political actor must possess the coercive power to
overcome competitors and meet what the political philosopher Bernard Williams
labels a ‘basic legitimation demand’.59 As with all historical Islamist movements in
the Horn of Africa (and perhaps elsewhere), the Shabaab is oppositional * it thrives
as a spoiler yet becomes exposed as a governing force.60 Even in opposition, the
Shabaab is failing to retain much legitimacy, since the central planks of its platform
have evaporated with the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces and the decision to institute
sharia law. What remains is the Shabaab’s vision of an Islamic caliphate returning
Somalis to their interpretation of purity in the Prophet’s time * an offer few Somalis
are drawn to. Hence, over the near-term, the conflict in Somalia is likely to remain a
stalemate: no player is presently powerful or popular enough to overcome its
contenders. Even if in areas such as the Presidential Palace in south Mogadishu
insurgent fighters are positioned just metres away from AU forces, we are unlikely to
witness the complete fall of the capital. The likely scenario is of an intensely violent
continuation of the present equilibrium.
The humanitarian crisis

The effect of the crisis on the Somali people surpasses even the endemic insecurity of
the 1990s. The scale of the violence and internal displacement has badly damaged the
coping mechanisms developed during two decades of statelessness. As many as 3.25
million people are in need of humanitarian assistance; 330 000 children in Somalia are
acutely malnourished and approximately 1.3 million Somalis remain internally
displaced.61 In total, there are approximately three million Somali refugees, including
those able to flee Somalia in the 1990s and 2000s for North America, Europe and the
Middle East.62 According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR), 204 000 people have been displaced from Mogadishu since early May
2009. While many have fled west to Afgooye, an area that hosts more than 400 000
IDPs, ‘the majority are now heading further afield to the Lower and Middle Shabelle,
Galgaduud, Bay and Lower Juba regions’.63 Meanwhile, Medicins Sans Frontiers, a
western non-governmental organisation (NGO), has left the capital’s clinics for the
first time in 17 years, leaving thousands without basic medical care.64
The international dimension

Events in Somalia since the Ethiopian withdrawal have solicited a range of
international responses and prevarications. The United Nations has tabled a plan
to intervene with a force of some 22 500 troops, although no UN member countries
have offered troops and the most recent UN reports argue against their deployment.
The most likely course of action for 20092010 is the adoption of a ‘light footprint’
approach in which the UN continues to strengthen AMISOM and assist the TFG in
building security institutions while retaining a low visible profile in the country.
Yet international concern is rising. In April 2009, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-
moon and AU Chairman Jean Ping hosted the first donor conference for Somalia in
18 years in Brussels, promising substantial funds for the interim government.65 In
July 2009, UN Security Council ambassadors discussed the imposition of a no-fly
zone and a blockade of Somali ports to prevent the entry of foreign fighters and
weapons shipments. The Security Council has also considered sanctioning Eritrea,
which stands accused of providing support to the insurgency.
The Obama administration, meanwhile, sent a $10 million arms and military
training package to President Ahmed’s government in June 2009.66 Washington has
also committed to financing the governments of Kenya, Burundi and Uganda to
train TFG troops.67 More strikingly, the United States has begun sharing
intelligence with the unity government and invited Somali political leaders to
Washington to develop a counter-insurgency strategy.
The Obama administration is eschewing military counterterrorism operations in
favour of a focus on state-building.68 The regional strategy has also undergone
adjustment. Johnnie Carson, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, posited
that ‘given the long-standing enmity between Somalis and Ethiopians, I will
encourage the Ethiopians not to re-engage in Somalia’.69 The Secretary of State
indicated that the administration will seek a ‘comprehensive’ approach, tacitly
admitting that, as recently as 2008, US Somalia policy within different government
agencies had worked at cross-purposes. To that end, the National Security Council
(NSC) has brought together the Department of State, the Department of Defense,
USAID and the intelligence community to draw-up a unified Somalia policy.
The following section returns to US Somalia policy under the Bush administra-
tion in an effort to unravel the unintended consequences of militaristic counter-
terrorism efforts, focusing on the role of Islam in Somali society and the origins and
motivation of Somalia’s Islamist groups.
Fighting terror, chasing shadows

As a Muslim state in close proximity to the Middle East and Sudan (host to al-Qaeda
in the 1990s), Somalia’s lawless environs seem a likely incubator of Islamic
extremism. After 9/11, this supposition was pushed forcefully by the Bush
administration. In his 2001 Senate testimony, then US Assistant Secretary of State
for African Affairs, Walter Kansteiner, concluded: ‘Where there should be a nation-
state [in Somalia], there is a vacuum filled by warlords. What better place for the
seeds of international terrorism and lawlessness to take root?’70
From 9/11 until the policy reappraisal under the Obama administration, US
intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense (if not always the State
Department and executive) acted on this premise by targeting jihadists militarily. Yet
the ‘War on Terror’ was a premise whose vocabulary and conjectures coalesced into
what the philosopher Michel Foucault described as a ‘regime of truth’ or what political
theorist Quentin Skinner identifies as ‘systems of meaning’ constructed through
‘rhetorical re-description.’71 Such a regime rests upon a ‘ ‘‘symbolic technology’’ that
contributes to the construction of knowledge . . . and legitimate policy responses, while
excluding and delegitimizing alternative knowledge’.72 Drawing on the narrative of
‘global terrorism’, Somalia’s Islamic Courts were understood in the western media,
where they attained prominence only a full decade after their arrival in Somali politics,
as an offshoot of al-Qaeda. This external perception of the Somali political landscape
was,
Based on events far away from Somalia with little or no consideration of internal Somali
politics [and used] after 20 December 2006 to justify the Ethiopian and US military
intervention in Somalia.73
The remainder of this section pursues two separate tasks, seeking firstly to uncover
the flaws in this perception and secondly to outline how the ‘War on Terror’
framework was refracted locally * adopted and applied instrumentally by certain
actors.
Islamism in Somalia
‘Transnational terrorism’ may be a concern for policymakers in Washington but it has
never been a significant entity in Somalia. In her 1981 study of the causes of terrorism,
Martha Crenshaw differentiated between instigative and permissive causes.74 On this
dichotomy, Somalia has only ever played host to permissive causes of terrorism. A
limited number of al-Qaeda operatives have used Somalia as an operational base or
transit point, but less so than in other states, including Kenya. There are likely more
extensive al-Qaeda networks in western states.
At second blush, Somalia is not even a very permissive environment. Kenneth
Menkhaus, a political scientist at Davidson College in the United States, has argued
that Somalia’s lack of government inhibits rather than facilitates international
‘terrorist’ groups. The US search for suspects is not restricted by concerns over
intrusions of sovereignty; Somalia’s instability precludes the presence of large numbers
of expatriates, making foreign jihadists more noticeable; and foreign jihadis remain
vulnerable to the same risks of kidnapping, extortion and betrayal that abound in
Somalia. In the factionalised game of Somali politics it has proven difficult for foreign
groups to enjoy the patronage of a particular group without being targeted by that
group’s adversaries.75
There is a second more systemic explanation: domestic support for radical
Islamism in Somalia is limited. The Somali interpretation of Islam is a ‘veil lightly
worn’. The majority of Somalis have traditionally followed a Shafi’i version of the
faith, governed by apolitical Sufi orders.76 After the collapse of the repressive Barre
government in 1991, numerous Islamist groups emerged but of these few pursued
political violence. The explanation for this opposition to extremism may lie in the
pastoral nature of Somali culture which ‘imbues a strong preference for pragmatism
over ideology, not so much as a matter of choice, but as a matter of survival’.77 Strict
Islamic codes such as Wahhabism are largely viewed as an imposition of ‘un-Somali’
Gulf customs.
After 1991, most Islamic groups, such as the charity al-Islaah, resembled western
NGOs, providing services in the absence of government. Of the minority of Salafist
groups associated with violence, al-Itihaad al-Islaami was the most prominent. The
organisation conducted operations in Somalia and the Ogaden * the eastern region
of Ethiopia inhabited by ethnic Somalis.78 The organisation’s objectives were
confined to the Horn, largely directed against Ethiopian rule in the Ogaden, where
it established a joint front with Ethiopian opposition groups such as the Ogaden
National Liberation Front (ONLF). But in 1996 Ethiopian forces attacked al-Itihaad
camps in Somalia and the organisation crumbled. By 2003, al-Itihaad amounted to
‘little more than a transient shadow cast across the Horn by militant Wahhabism and
Arab oil wealth’.79
The existence and activities of al-Qaeda in Somalia are even less certain. The
group has maintained an interest in the country, ‘but the attraction does not seem to
have been mutual’.80 Few Somalis have joined al-Qaeda and the attacks perpetrated
by al-Qaeda in East Africa have not included individuals of Somali origin.81 Some
analysts claim a working relationship between al-Qaeda and al-Itihaad in the early
1990s when Osama Bin laden was based in Khartoum; thereafter accusations have
circulated that al-Qaeda operatives * such as the perpetrators of the Paradise Hotel
bombing in Kenya in 2002 * have found shelter in southern Somalia. But
significantly, when choosing a new base after his departure from Sudan in 1996,
Bin Laden eschewed Somalia as a refuge.82 (Perhaps his leadership had discerned
that the country’s militias and Islamist groups were left cold by al-Qaeda’s global
vision.)83
Thus, in spite of the convictions professed by the Ethiopian government and the
TFG, the hopes of al-Qaeda itself and the assumptions of US policymakers,
Somalia’s conflict fits uneasily with the simple ‘global jihadism versus pro-western
secularism’ dichotomy. The motives of Somalia’s various actors are messier, more
local, perhaps mercantile. Rendering this more variegated account requires a return
to the pre-1991 era. On one level, the narrative stems from the dynamics of clan, a
unit politicised under British and Italian colonial rule and energised further by
Siyaad Barre, whose consolidation of power rested upon the manipulation of clan
politics through his alliance of Darod clans. By the 1980s, the clan unit had become a
signifier for group competition over state-directed resources. This signifier was
retained in the Somali imagination after the outbreak of civil war and so the idea of
the state has retained its imaginative link to the zero-sum contest for political
supremacy between clans. The following section traces this dynamic from the
outbreak of conflict in 1991 to the present.
Interest-groups and Islamism: the clan connection

In 1991, the main clan protagonists that ousted the Darod-dominated Barre
government were affiliated to Hawiye, Isaaq and Ogaden clan lineages.84 The contours
of this original contest can be traced through to the initial Hawiye-dominated
insurgency in 2007. When the TNG formed in 2001, it represented the interests of the
Hawiye and its Arab and Egyptian backers. After the TNG dissolved under pressure
from the SRRC, ‘the clan alliances underpinning the TNG [were] . . . replaced by a
rival set of alliances * aided and abetted by Ethiopia * that became the TFG’.85 This
rival alliance was popularly perceived as a Darod-dominated group (80% of the TFG
ministers belonged to the alliance of Darod-dominated factions that Ethiopia had
supported against the TNG in 2003).86 Perceiving a threat to their lucrative business
interests and following their exclusion from the new government being formed in
Kenya, the Hawiye clan * and the Ayr subclan of the Habr Gedir in particular *
sought to project their interests through the Islamic Courts. The new government
angered the Hawiye leadership further through its removal of Sharif Hassan Sheikh
Aden, the TFG parliament speaker. Although a member of the Rahaweyn clan, Sharif
Hassan was viewed as the ‘key representative of the Hawiye business class’.87 Faced
with disenfranchisement, the Hawiye leadership organised armed opposition to the
government and looked to Asmara for assistance.
The salience here is not that clan explains all in Somali politics (it does not) but
rather that the success of the Courts, even their existence, relied on the support of the
Hawiye clan-grouping and the assistance of the most secular state in Africa, Eritrea.
By 2008 Asmara was hosting the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS),
comprising the remnants of the Courts, disgruntled ex-TFG ministers and a coalition
of intellectuals and businessmen. Hence, the conflict in 2007 arose not between
Islamists and their adversaries but rather from competition over access to the state
between rival interests groups, driven by economic class and signified by clan. That
conflagration then fed into the Ethio-Eritrean regional security dilemma. (With the
government and insurgent forces in 20072008 representing strikingly similar clan
divisions to the Barre-era civil war, some interpreted in the 2007 Ethiopian invasion
and subsequent shelling of urban areas ‘a nightmare scenario of a Darod revenge for
the ‘cleansing’ of Darod clans from Mogadishu in 1991’.)88
In this way, a sequence of perplexing chapters * civil war in the 1990s, the
subversion and dissolution of the TNG, its replacement by the TFG, the rise of the
Courts and their defeat by the Ethiopian-backed TFG * each represented
consecutive rounds of competition for political power between two central clan-
groupings and two regional adversaries. Since 9/11, one side * the Darod-dominated
TFG and Ethiopia * has profited from accusing the other of ‘Islamic terrorism’ and
accruing the attendant benefits of US support. The following section brings this
instrumentality into focus.
The instrumentality of ‘terror’

In 2002, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, declared his country ‘at the epicenter
of terrorism and a secular island in the sea of Islam’.89 Such rhetoric reflected a keen
understanding for the opportunities afforded by the post-9/11 strategic paradigm
constructed by the only Western state willing to consider politicalmilitary interven-
tion in the Horn. Ethiopia harnessed the US agenda instrumentally for its own
domestic and regional purposes. In the domestic sphere, US sponsorship provided a
crutch to the Zenawi regime in power for nearly two decades. The government’s shaky
electoral and human rights record was partially protected from external criticism and
the threat of donor cancellation by virtue of Ethiopia’s close relationship to
Washington.90
Moreover, US military and financial resources given to the Ethiopian regime have
been substantial. In 2003, US food aid to Ethiopia was nearly half a billion dollars.91
Ethiopia received military support through the US Foreign Military Financing
(FMF), International Military Education and Training (IMET), and Anti-Terrorism
Assistance (ATA) programmes. Since 2002, American military instructors have been
training Ethiopian forces and pro-Ethiopian Somalis in Ethiopia.92 While Washington
has provided limited direct military aid, it has enabled large arms transfers from other
states. One example in particular warrants elaboration. In violation of US-led UN
sanctions on arms sales from North Korea, Washington overlooked an arms shipment
from Pyongyang to Addis Ababa via the Somaliland port of Berbera in the lead-up to
Ethiopia’s invasion of southern Somalia.93
In addition to accruing political capital from US support, the Ethiopian
government utilised the US resource flow to further its regional interests. The
motivation for the invasion of southern Somalia had less in connection with
‘international terrorism’ than with Ethiopia’s perception of the regional balance of
power. When President Ahmed met with his Ethiopian counterparts for the first time in
2009, the first question raised was ‘why the Islamic Courts had warm relationships with
Asmara, not whether [the Courts] were Salafi or jihadist.’94 Ethio-Eritrean relations
remain bellicose.95 Realism dictates that the Ethiopian government cannot abide a
recrudescence of political power in Somalia that favours Eritrean interests. Moreover,
the historical lessons drawn from the 19771978 border war between Ethiopia and
Somalia remain part of the institutional memory in the Ethiopian regime: history
suggests that a strong Somali state independent of Ethiopian influence may pursue
irredentist grievances in the Ogaden, backed by Asmara. For these reasons, Somalia
remains a proxy theatre for conflict with Eritrea; hence, despite Prime Minister Meles
Zenawi’s counterterrorism rhetoric, US and Ethiopian motivations for deposing the
ICU differed substantially.
This divergence was also evident in Ethiopia’s assistance to the US over the
detention of ‘terrorist suspects’. In April 2007, more than 200 CIA and FBI agents
established a base of operations in the Sheraton Hotel in Addis Ababa where they
detained and interrogated dozens of suspects provided by the Ethiopian govern-
ment.96 However, far from being al-Qaeda suspects, many of those interned were
simply Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) fighters. The US rendition
programme simply provided a useful depository for the Ethiopian government’s
domestic adversaries.
Somali actors
The most obvious example of the instrumental application of the ‘War on Terror’
occurred in 2006 with the emergence of the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and
Counterterrorism. The organisation consisted of nine Hawiye militia leaders and
businessmen and their attendant militias. As an exercise in branding, the group
displayed considerable acumen but their motivation was less original: the control of
territory in order to accumulate rents. In early 2006, the CIA began channelling
between $100,000 and $150,000 per month to the Alliance. Military equipment was
also provided through Select Armor, a private military company (PMC) based in
Virginia (USA).97 Although these funds were conditioned on the ARPCT’s promise to
deliver terrorist suspects, the Alliance was more interested in contesting Mogadishu’s
turf-wars. After the defeat of the ARPCT, the organisation’s militia simply surrendered
and joined the ranks of the Islamic Courts.98
The TFG played a similar game. Just days after the installation of the new
government in Mogadishu, Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi claimed he needed
only to ‘wipe out the terrorists clearly linked to Al-Qaeda’,99 to bring stability to
Somalia. This focus on terrorism attracted significant US funding. But like Ethiopia,
the interim government nurtured the ‘War on Terror’ narrative for its own purposes.
President Yusuf, for example, used the pretext to target his personal political enemies
and business competitors.100
Yet the government’s rhetoric and actions were not only opportunistic. The
unbridled adoption of the ‘War on Terror’ paradigm by President Yusuf, however
dislocated from political reality, also reflected an intractable dilemma facing his
government. And here we return to the hazardous challenge for post-interventionary
states of playing simultaneously to a domestic and international audience. The TFG
displayed small interest, and certainly little ability, in enhancing its performance
legitimacy. But this was partly because by assuming power on Ethiopia’s coat-tails, the
TFG was never in a position to engender popular support. The anger engendered
among Somalis when the government supported US strikes that led to innocent
casualties only worsened an already dire situation. With the prospect of gaining
domestic legitimacy closed-off, obtaining international legitimacy and support (even if
this reduced domestic support still further) was the only reason of state that remained
on offer. When the TFG painted itself as a bulwark preventing terrorism, the
government understood it was playing exclusively to an international audience. Yet
Yusuf’s preoccupation with ratifying or acquiescing to US and Ethiopian decisions
appeared as the only guarantor of his survival, even if this proved insufficient in the
final analysis.
Beyond the governmental elite, the ‘War on Terrorism’ is an anathema to Somalis,
for whom there are more immediate things to fear. State legitimacy derives from a
government’s ability to facilitate security (first) and prosperity (second), yet the TFG
sought only to ‘protect’ its citizens from something about which it made no sense for
them to be afraid. By the end of 2008, this disconnect and the disillusion it incurred
had forced the TFG into negotiation with elements of the opposition.
The Shabaab
Just as the focus on ‘terrorism’ in Somalia began to wane in 20072008, observers
were beginning to argue that the Shabaab represented, for the first time, the true
arrival of ‘global terrorism’ on Somali soil. It is to the force of this argument that we
now turn.
Information on the Shabaab is hazy. The group is presently the strongest and best
financed in Somalia, controlling the largest territory in the south of the country. A
Somali, Ahmed Abdi Godane, leads the movement, aided by a 10-member shura or
council. However, the autonomy of different cells allows regional leaders to pursue
strategies independently. The organisation maintains two wings, the military Jaysh
Al-Usra (army of hardship) and the law and order branch Jaysh Al-Hesbah (army of
morality). Although foreign fighters have joined, the Shabaab’s vision of jihad,
recalling that of Al-Itihaad in the 1990s, has a regional rather than global focus.
In a second parallel, the Shabaab merges Islamism with a strident vision of pan-
Somali nationalism, a conflation that attracted popular support during the
prosecution of so-called ‘just war’ against the Ethiopian occupation. The brutality
of the Ethiopian occupation from January 2007 to January 2009 left Somalis (and the
Somali diaspora) enraged. However, following the Ethiopian withdrawal and
introduction of sharia law, it has become increasingly hard for the Shabaab to
make the ‘just war’ case. Somalis are simply less convinced by the casting of former
Islamic Courts leader President Ahmed and the AMISOM forces as ‘infidels’.101
Does global concern over a Shabaabal-Qaeda connection accord with the local
facts? At least two factors suggest the conflation is exaggerated. Firstly, just as the
interim government made use of the language of ‘terrorism’ to garner external
resources, so the Shabaab deploys the language of jihad both to attract international
assistance and to provide a structure to govern. The strategy is purposive, not merely
ideological. Jihadi rhetoric attracts external resources from the Gulf and beyond.
Looking beyond the hackneyed typologies of western pundits, for whom recourse to
an al-Qaeda rationalisation is expedient, there is a familiar element of raison d’état
instrumentality at play.
Secondly, the Shabaab has deployed Salafi-Wahhabism in the areas it controls as
a tool for ‘social transformation’, transcending local clan divisions. Like the ICU in
2006, the organisation has provided the local population with a modicum of service
provision and a legal apparatus through sharia courts. In Baidoa, seat of the TFG
parliament, the Shabaab met with local community leaders, held public rallies and
negotiated a peaceful take-over with local elders. In other areas, such as Kismayo, the
Shabaab is ruling at the apex of a confluence of business interests, based on the trade
in khat (a mild amphetamine) and charcoal.102 These strategies indicate a pragmatic
streak that removes the Shabaab from the nihilism of the al-Qaeda model.
Such a conclusion may appear at odds with the violence of the Shabaab’s actions
but the extensive opus on the motivation of extremist groups indicates that suicide
attacks and other methods are driven less by religious zeal than political grievance.103
Moreover, these actions occur in a fluid conflict in which over the previous five years,
‘hit squads and factions paid for by the United States and/or Ethiopia were killing or
kidnapping religious figures and Islamic militants’.104 Like Hamas in Eiaza, the
Shabaab retains the potential to transform itself into a political party, a possibility that
was underlined when a power struggle within Hizbul-Islam led to the emergence of
former ICU leader and mercurial pragmatist Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys as leader.
Indeed, rather as Hamas was ostracised for its extremist credentials only to be
outflanked in 2009 by new groups whose call for an Islamic caliphate made the Hamas
agenda appear moderate by comparison, so the sweeping condemnation of the
Shabaab may in retrospect appear counter-productive.105 The Shabaab can be
characterised as a populist group ‘with a Salafist orientation [whose] core leadership
[understand] that they cannot rule a region or a country against the whole world.’106
It is also noteworthy that whatever the divergence of their subsequent paths, the
ICU * a movement that included the Shabaab * emerged in part on the crest of a
widely shared aspiration for a new generation of Somali leaders to take over from the
generation tainted by civil war. Thus, class and religion, the Shabaab (‘youth’ in
Arabic) comprises part of a generational struggle, seeking to overturn the generation
that led Somalia to ruin.
Why should the distinction between populist militia and terrorist organisation
matter? The question is relevant because in the face of the Shabaab’s increasing grip
on power in 2009, international observers have once again returned to the notion that
Somalia is in danger of becoming a ‘safe haven for al-Qaeda’. While the assumption
is specious, its very propagation fuels the on-going conflict. The language of
‘terrorism’ puts in absolute terms the conflict between parties in Somalia, making the
possibility of reconciliation more distant. Such polarisation stands in contrast to
the successful Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) negotiations between the
Khartoum government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in Sudan in
2003 where international mediators treated both government and opposition as
entities with legitimate political grievances. In Somalia, only one side has received
this treatment (notwithstanding the admission of the ARS as a legitimate opposition
in 2009). ‘Terrorism’ is a label that masks the real economic and political grievances
of Somalia’s interest groups, exacerbating the conflict by reducing common ground.
A major obstacle to peace therefore remains the reluctance of the external world
to give-up its seductive dichotomies between Islamists and secularists and between
moderate and hard-line Islamists. If a lasting settlement is to obtain in Somalia, the
Islamist opposition cannot be excluded. The most immediate problem, however, is
not that reconciliation is de facto impossible or that the ideological intransigence of
the Shabaab is preventing it, but rather that with the Islamist insurgents controlling
the greater part of southern Somalia, the present balance of power provides no
incentive for them to do so. One phenomenon that may encourage that balance to
shift is the remarkable rise of the religious opposition the Shabaab began to face in
the spring of 2009, the subject of the following section.
Religious war
The uprising of Sufi groups in areas controlled by the Shabaab was unforeseen by
external observers. It is a sub-plot whose full dimensions remain as yet unclear. Sufi
groups had remained aloof from the clan conflicts of the 1990s and 2000s. Yet in
November 2008, the Shabaab shot dead several Sufi students and destroyed a number
of Sufi shrines, stirring local religious sentiment. As Sufi leaders increasingly felt
targeted for associative reasons, they found themselves engulfed in the wider conflict.
As one Sufi leader, Sheik Omar Mohamed Farah, declared: ‘this time, it was
religious’.107
The uprising, led by the Al-Sunna w’al-Jama’a, is militarily active only in the
central Somali region of Galgaduud. The organisation has succeeded in driving
Shabaab insurgents out of several towns of the region.108 In their place, it has
established its own incipient local administration, liaising with UN officials and
patrolling the locality.109
For Roland Marchal, a senior research fellow at the National Center of Scientific
Research in Paris, Al-Sunna w’al-Jama’a represents ‘a challenge to Al-Shabaab but
eventually also the TFG. [However,] it is limited at this stage’.110 The accomplishments
of Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jama’a imply two realities. First, the severe Wahhabi governing
methods of al-Shabaab, which echo those on view in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, and
include stonings and amputations, elicit little local support.111 In mid-2009, popular
resistance to the insurgency was reported with increasing frequency. On 26 March, for
example, hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets in protest against a ban on the
sale of the narcotic khat (and in response, the Shabaab intensified its strategy of
coercive intimidation by assassinating selected opponents).112
Second, the wide territorial dominance of the jihadists is perhaps more a function
of the lack of any countervailing force than an emblem of innate strength. The
movement’s support has weakened considerably, since two pillars of its political
programme have been removed by the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops and the
introduction of Sharia law by the new government. The Shabaab may find itself
progressively confined to pursuing the insurgency only ‘in conditions that are suitable
for its low membership and its lack of popular support’.113 However, Ken Menkhaus
cautions against over-stating the importance of the Sufi uprising: ‘religiously-based
opposition to the shabaab and its radical interpretation of Islam is already wide and
deep in Somalia, but it has not been able to organize itself . . . The Sufi militias are
only a small part of the equation, at least for the moment.’114 Hence, the TFG
requires a broader alliance than the present accommodation with the Sufi groups to
change the balance of power in south-central Somalia. ‘If the TFG is able to build an
alliance capable of gradually pushing back al-Shabaab, it will be via a combination of
clan-based alliances, business funding, and co-optation of some or even much of the
forces currently fighting in the name of al-Shabaab.’115
Does President Ahmed have the support and the political élan to draft in his
adversaries? By the July of 2009, progress was measured but tangible. The government
has appointed as state Defense Minister a former official of the Hizbul-Islam
insurgent group which fights alongside al-Shabaab.116 And through intermediaries
such as the Islamic Clerics Council, the Hawiye Cultural and Unity Council and
influential clan leaders, the TFG has reached out to other insurgent groups and has
persuaded some to join the peace process.117 Yet the co-optation imperative, however
expedient, offers no panacea. Firstly, the full spectrum of Somali Islamists share a
predilection for pan-Somali nationalism whose corollary is a rejection of the federal
‘building-blocks’ approach in favour of a strong centralised state. Having such a voice
at large within government is likely to worsen relations with the more secular and
secessionist outlook of the semi-autonomous republics in the north. In Iraq, Nouri
Al-Maliki has yet to discover whether the Sunni awakening of 2007, in which Sunni
tribes with historical ambivalence to the state were armed to oppose al-Qaeda, will
place limits on the kinds of political programme his government can attempt. As the
leader of a state considerably more hapless than Iraq in shaping its own future,
President Ahmed will face similar restrictions the deeper his co-optation agenda is
pursued.
Second, full-scale co-optation risks de-legitimising the government, leaving it
hamstrung. In Afghanistan, the Karzai government adopted this approach. In the
2005 parliamentary elections, no fewer than 557 candidates had challenges filed
against their names on grounds of corruption, drugs trafficking or war crimes. Only 11
were disqualified. Between 50% and 80% of Afghan parliamentarians are former drug
traffickers and strongmen who continue their enterprises in office with impunity.118
The net effect has been to alienate the Afghan population from an increasingly
predatory government and fuel support for the Taliban insurgency. In Somalia,
President Ahmed risks inviting a similar outcome if his policy of co-optation is not
more discriminating. It is a difficult impasse as the least desirable candidates for
government office often exercise a very immediate form of incumbency advantage
through the exercise of power in their local areas of control * a reflection of the fact
that Somalia continues to struggle with the first political question of all, that of
creating statehood from mayhem. The following section considers how external actors
have been drawn to a seductive remedy for that question: the imposition of an
externally inspired and centralised state.
Beyond Leviathan: the political economy of statelessness119

The modus operandi and guiding US interpretation of events in Somalia shifted with
the incoming Obama administration. Although the Shabaab is considered a ‘global
terrorist entity’ and the administration’s guiding objective is still the elimination of
‘terrorism’, this has not tempted it into the use of direct force. Rather, the US has
taken the long-view that state-building should be viewed as the only durable form of
counter-terrorism.
Few would deny that this new policy is more reasonable than the old. But the new
approach raises a new dilemma: as Harvard professor Rory Stewart contends, ‘[the
United States] claim[s] to be engaged in a neutral, technocratic, universal project of
‘‘state-building’’ but we don’t know exactly what that means.’120 President Obama’s
Somalia policy has a narrow focus, to prevent terrorists from operating in Somalia,
but the method for achieving it * creating a Somali state * is so expansive as to lose
meaning. As Stewart notes in the case of Afghanistan the relationship between
counter-terrorism and state-building is presented as a ‘formal syllogism’;121 yet this
represents a very strained line of thinking indeed.
The post-Cold War notion of state-building emerged as an expedient response to
a set of pressing political problems confronting a newly unipolar world. It was drawn
loosely from the history of western political thought and experience, based upon a
juridical view of the international system. The philosophers of the modern state (e.g.
Hobbes and Locke, Kant and Hegel) were each engaged with the twin questions of
how to establish a Leviathan (a monopoly on the legitimate use of force) and how to
render that monopoly as legitimate. The supposition for policymakers seeking
to build states externally is the need for strong and representative government able to
pursue economic development. These objectives are then conflated into a single,
hypnotising, framework. The flaw is that such a policy matrix merely comprises a
description of what has failed to obtain in Somalia for at least 18 years. It deceives, as
Stewart notes,
In several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating
our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power,
and confusing our goals . . . It conjures nightmares of . . . ‘global extremism’ [and] offers
the remed[y] of ‘state-building.’122
Perhaps mercifully, memory of the United States’ earlier intervention in Somalia and
the country’s relative lack of strategic value warned even the ‘vulcans’ of the Bush
administration against using Somalia as testing ground for state-building via the
direct projection of US power. (Indeed, Somalia has twice been overshadowed by the
prosecution of an American war in the Gulf. When Mogadishu first erupted in
December 1990, international concern was focused on the first Gulf War; in 2002
2003 Somalia was initially raised as a site for intervention but later dismissed as plans
for the Iraq invasion gathered momentum.) But regardless of whether it is pursued
militarily or by external assistance, state-building carries no necessary link to counter-
terrorism (consider the Indian state, after 60 years of consolidation, still facing
multiple domestic insurgencies; or the British state, after a thousand, during the
Troubles).123 Moreover, Somalia provides an abrupt dismissal of the causal link
between conflict and economic development championed by the Oxford economist
Paul Collier.124 Somalia maintains a gross product far higher than its neighbours,
Ethiopia and Eritrea, and those states currently providing for its security, such as
Burundi. Somalia has among the most sophisticated telecommunications and
financial sectors in Africa (remittances account for approximately 40% of gross
national product and the country’s leading money transfer company, al-Barakaat,
generates around $3 million in profit each year).125 Importexport figures place
Somalia above 25 African countries.126
The sum of this assorted sweep of state-building assumptions is an instinctive

preference for a strong centralised state. But this conclusion is mistaken because the
decisive relationship in durable state-formation is not between terrorism, development
and state-formation but rather between class (economic) and political power. Indeed, it
is the central claim of this paper that any understanding of what a stable Somali state
might look like must reach beyond the state-building hypothesis and the dynamics of
clannism to grasp the economic incentive structures that drive interest group
behaviour.
For example, a traditional state-building emphasis on representation has led to
experiments such as the UN-brokered 4.5 clan formula (matching clan size to seat
representation in a government of national unity). In the current unity government,
MPs are selected on the basis of a similar formula, leaving each clan to negotiate
internally how best to represent its sub-clans. The effect is to explicitly politicise clan
as a vehicle to access state power in contrast to its intended purpose, which is to
ameliorate clan antagonism. (This system also leads to claims that MPs from the
Puntland and Somaliland are interfering by tackling issues in the south, adding heat
to the simmering federal question.) Analytically, this clan focus obscures the interest
groups that truly matter. The real conflict is over control of productive resources. One
way of bringing into focus the reality that clan politics cannot provide the foundation
for statehood is to look north to the creation of the (so far) resilient semi-
autonomous republics of Puntland and Somaliland. Alex de Waal offers an
assessment of how stability in these unlikely polities was secured:
The success of certain factions of the merchant class in gaining control of state [was
critical to stability]. This is related to the fact that the dominant mode of production in
these regions is pastoralism and the livestock export trade, rather than agriculture and
state-focused rent-seeking . . . In the 1990s, the leading export traders of Berbera played
a key role in establishing and stabilising the Somaliland state, while those in Bosaso
played a similar role in Puntland . . . The Republic of Somaliland may be described as a
profit-sharing agreement among the dominant livestock traders, with a constitution
appended.127
While it may be specious to apply the Somaliland model directly to southern Somalia,
the contrasts in political economy provide a useful basis for gauging how different
actors in southern Somalia have come to view the state and why. In the south, historical
experience stretching back to the Barre regime of the 1970s and 1980s informs an
incentive structure that champions control of state-directed resources. Clan identity
acts as a potent but functional mechanism for the collective organisation of economic
interests in the pursuit of state access (political Islam can perform a similar function
and links the merchant class to neighbouring markets in the Gulf). During the 1980s,
capitalist development and cumulative land acquisition * both channelled in large
part through the state * allowed one favoured strata of the emergent merchant class to
acquire significant wealth and possession of vast stretches of agricultural and pastoral
land.128 Competitors, such as the Isaak livestock merchants, were partially squeezed
out. This systematic expropriation for the politically favoured was ‘economic madness
that directly attacked the productive sectors of the economy . . . [Subsequently] the
state’s dependence on foreign aid and military coercion proved unsustainable and it
collapsed.’129
The perversion of the economy in the 1980s set in train a number of legacies that
continue to breed conflict in Somali society. Firstly, land theft and asset
expropriation are still unresolved. The potential for conflict lingers between current
tenants and a ‘landowner’ class that occupied property in the capital before being
forced to flee in 1991. Disputes over the prime real estate in Mogadishu and riverine
land across southern Somalia continue to fester and any new government will face
pressure to resolve them. To these grievances may be added the prospect of violent
competition between the livestock traders of Berbera and Bosaso and a new
government supporting its own mercantile class to dominate the livestock trade.
Because the Somali state has historically dictated the winners and losers of the
political economy and commercial class, current political competition is intensified
as elites anticipate that those who gain control of the state will deploy it as did their
forbears two decades ago.130 In short, the extreme rent-seeking, accumulation of
foreign patronage and commercial control of the Barre regime continues to ensure
that ‘conflict over the imaginary resources of a restored state has been sufficient to
disable the establishment of an effective state.’131 The problem is that each of the 15
peace agreements attempted since 1991, including the TFG, has simply tried to re-
institute the old state-centric patrimonial structures.
Thus, on each occasion groups that fear being poorly represented perceive that
they have everything economically to lose from allowing the formation of the new
government. This dilemma is exacerbated by the unique access any government will
obtain to external aid and the prospect of state-directed international economic co-
operation. The latter may become more significant in the wake of the appearance of
China in the current narrative of Somali politics. In July 2007, for example, the
Chinese state oil giant, CNOOC, secured permission to search for oil in Somalia.
(The CNOOC’s deal with the TFG provided for exploration rights in the north
Mudug region, 500 kilometres north-east of Mogadishu. One oil group has estimated
that Somalia’s Puntland province has the potential to yield between five and ten
billion barrels of oil.)132
The only existing alternative in recent Somali history to this zero-sum game for
domination of a neo-patrimonial state apparatus was the Islamic Courts movement
in 2006. The ICU consisted in the projection of the interests of the Mogadishu
business class and functioned as an adaptable site for political rule. (The problem in
this case was the international climate and the narrowness of the commercial class
represented.) Yet the ICU experiment was the first successful exercise in ‘organizing
the business sector into a political force capable of gaining control over state
structures’.133 In the light of each successive failure to create a monopoly on force
(including, since 1991, the UN intervention, the ICU, the Ethiopian occupation and
the US-sponsored TFG government, backed by AU peacekeeping forces), a
properly co-ordinated mobilisation of the different strata of the business class
may prove the only escape from the ‘prisoners dilemma’ * whereby any one faction
will always desire to opt out of a proposal for state-formation * created by a
heavily charged set of expectations about the state’s purposes. The barriers would be
many. For example, the nature and duration of the Somali conflict has created a
‘war economy’ in which, for certain powerful actors, statelessness has become a
good for its own sake. Such a compact would scarcely address the social and
economic scars left by two decades of war, such as the massive youth unemploy-
ment that feeds directly into militia recruitment, or the $3.7 billion in debt still
owed to the Bretton Woods international financial institutions.134 Nevertheless, it
remains Somalis most rational hope for statehood able to endure. The difficulty is
that this messier line of state-building would first require external actors to reject
the idea of a strong, centralised and clan-representative state as their starting point
for engagement * a stance that goes to the heart of the ‘state-building’ world view.
Conclusion
This article has detailed two external interpretations of Somali politics and evaluated
the impact of the policies arising from these. The argument has been that when such
paradigms are set against an analytical narrative of the core political logic of events in
Somalia, a dissonance arises. This dissonance has impaired external engagement in the
country and yielded a number of unforeseen consequences. Somalia presents a highly
visible case of the distorting power of normative language when wedded to other forms
of power. (The example of the Somali ‘terrorist’ whose status is ‘defined’ through
inclusion on the US terror list is germane.)135 Terms such as ‘terrorist’ help simplify
and moralise, while generalised policy frameworks offer seductive yet specious
pathways through the complexity of Somali politics.
The implication for the United States is that a more discursive approach may yield
fewer unwanted consequences. Such an approach must begin with recognition of the
regional dimension. It was only in the wake of the Ethiopian occupation that the
United States began to view Eritrea as a key player in Somalia.136 While Washington
would do well to avoid backing Ethiopian interests as unthinkingly as it did in 2007,
Eritrea should be identified as the principle spoiler. By the summer of 2009, Asmara
was providing a monthly sum of $500,000 to leading insurgents in Somalia, plus arms
and a safe haven. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s threat of UN Security Council
sanctions is a positive step; but engagement with Eritrea is also required and may bring
results. As a classic spoiler, the Eritrean regime is actually more likely to respond to a
reversal in the incentive structure of its international relations (few recall, for example,
that in 2003, Eritrea dispatched a team to Washington, DC, to lobby for the
AFRICOM headquarters to be located in Asmara).137 All this will require careful
balance and recognition that, with the leading regional actors still choking on the jingo
enmity of partition and war, progress will be slow.
The United States must also recognise the weakness of its own agency as a state
whose past actions in Somalia will taint Somali perceptions for a generation. The
difficult reality, however, is that while the US is poorly disposed to lead any
external engagement, regional actors are even less suitable. Somali politics lie inert
in a regional dynamic that makes it a theatre for the Ethio-Eritrean security
dilemma to play out. Until a new political shock alters the incentive structure,
Somalia is doomed to statelessness by default. The change will not come from
Asmara, Addis Ababa, Cairo or Khartoum. There is simply no political capital
anywhere in the Horn. President Afewerki of Eritrea remains a spoiler; President
Bashir of Sudan is facing arrest and partition in his own country and President
Zenawi of Ethiopia is set shortly to resign. Neither is change likely to come solely
from within Somalia. The accumulated web of friendenemy distinctions is too
thick. Perhaps only the Obama administration has the power (if not the will) to
break the stalemate. To do so, it must pursue careful engagement with the entire
spectrum of actors (including the Shabaab) rather than labelling them. Support for
some version of political Islam is a rational response to government failure. It has
been consistent in Somalia for more than a decade and will remain so. Hence, any
lasting settlement must draw in Islamists from the insurgent umbrella. Moreover,
the US will need to appreciate that it cannot influence short-term events in Somalia
using force; attempting to do so would renew the Shabaab’s claim to Somali

nationhood couched as resistance to foreign interference. The administration must
also navigate the exigencies of domestic political competition. For example, if the
TFG were to fall, this would provide the Republican opposition an opportunity to
question the toughness of President Obama’s national security and foreign policy
agenda.
In the meantime, politics in Somalia continue. Three future scenarios are
possible. In the best case, the unity government will co-opt the larger part of the
insurgency and gradually regain territory from what opposition remains. In the
worst, Mogadishu will fall, prompting a new cycle of intervention from external
actors * Ethiopia and the US, Somaliland and Puntland * unable to stomach a
recrudescence of jihadist power. The most likely medium-term outcome is status
quo ante * a violent continuation of the chronically unstable environment with
localities controlled by the Shabaab, the TFG or local militias. Every scenario
implies a degree of conflict. A better alternative is possible only if the regional
and international players can improve the quality and lessen the frequency of their
interferences. For that to transpire there would first have to be a will in
Washington to actively resolve the local and regional impasse and with the will a
way that follows not from abstracted paradigms but rather from a properly
contextualised sense of the core political logic of events in Somalia and the wider
Horn.
Notes on contributors
Ashley Elliot currently works at the World Bank Group in Washington, DC, USA.
Georg-Sebastian Holzer is a Research Assistant at the Johns Hopkins University School of
Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC, USA.
Notes
1. AP, 6 August 2009.
2. The law will now be submitted to parliament for consideration; see UN Security Council,
16 April 2009, p. 2.
3. The phrase is Hawthorn’s. See Hawthorn, 1999, p. 155.
4. Borger, 2009.
5. See, for example, Bradbury, 1994; Besteman, 1999.
6. See, for example, Stephenson, 2007; Menkhaus, 2005; Bryden, 2003.
7. Menkhaus et al., 2009, p. 7.
8. Bennett, 2009.
9. De Waal & Salaam, 2004, p. 231.
10. International Crisis Group, 23 May 2002, p. i; Menkhaus, 2005, p. 27.
11. Bryden, 2003, p. 24.
12. Barnes & Hassan, 2007.
13. International Crisis Group, 2002, p. i.
14. International Crisis Group, 11 June 2005, p. i.
15. Woodward, 2006, p. 144.
16. International Crisis Group, 2005a, p. 2.
17. Indeed, the refusal of the ‘Mogadishu Group’ of Hawiye militia leaders and businessmen
to accept a provisional government located outside of the capital indicated a ‘transparent
attempt to use its militia dominance over Mogadishu to hold the TFG hostage’,
Menkhaus, 2007, p. 363.
18. Barnes & Hassan, 2007, p. 152.
19. International Crisis Group, 2006, p. 1.
20. Menkhaus, 2007, p. 369.

21. Le Sage, personal email correspondance with author, 18 April 2007.
22. UN Security Council, 2006, pp. 15, 2223.
23. Menkhaus, 2007, p. 371.
24. Ibid., p. 371.
25. Economist, 6 January 2007.
26. Menkhaus, 2007, p. 371.
27. International Crisis Group, 2007, p. 1.
28. BBC News website, 1 March 2007.
29. Somalia and Ethiopia went to war over the contested Ogaden region in 1977.
30. The Telegraph, 6 January 2007.
31. The Independent, 3 May 2008. Ayro was suspected of perpetrating the 1998 US embassy
bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
32. US officials confirmed that these attacks were directed on the basis of intelligence reports
regarding the whereabouts of ‘known al-Qaeda associates’, although the attacks are only
known to have killed civilians, livestock and a smattering of Islamic fighters fleeing south
from Mogadishu. See McCrummen, 27 April 2007.
33. Menkhaus, 2007, p. 378.
34. Marchal, 5 February 2007.
35. Guardian, 27 April 2007.
36. Menkhaus, 2007, p. 386.
37. Shabelle Media Network, 5 April 2007.
38. Independent, 7 April 2007.
39. Weinstein, 2007.
40. Reuters, 13 March 2008; Institute for Security Studies, 15 March 2007.
41. UN Security Council, 9 March 2009, p. 2.
42. Hassan & Hayes, 2009; UN Security Council, 9 March 2009. The ARS received 200, with
the remaining seats allocated to members of civil society, businesspeople, women, the
diaspora and other opposition groups.
43. The Djibouti process showed more promise than previous attempts, not least because in
place of the 3000 participants that had swarmed to the Mgbathi talks, the various sides
were on this occasion able delegate negotiations to senior representatives.
45. UN Security Council, 16 April 2009, p. 1; the enlarged unity Cabinet comprised 36
members.
46. Ibid., p. 8.
47. Economist, 21 May 2009.
48. UN Security Council, 9 March 2009, pp. 34.
49. Kroslak & Stoehlein, 2009.
50. UN Security Council, 16 April 2009, pp. 56. AMISOM is currently deployed at the
‘seaport and airport, Villa Somalia, the old university and military academy, and other
strategic sites in Mogadishu. The forces provide security . . . basic medical support and
freshwater to the local community . . . and support to the fledgling Somali National
Defence Force’, Ibid.
51. UN Security Council, 16 April 2009, p. 3.
54. Höhne, 2008.
55. Menkhaus et al., 2009, p. 7.
56. Economist, 25 June 2009.
57. Reuters, 24 June 2009.
58. Reuters, 19 June 2009.
59. See Williams, 2005.
60. Gettleman, 2 June 2009.
62. Ould-Abdallah, 2008, p. 2.
63. UNHCR, 7 July 2009.
64. MSF Press Release, 7 July 2009.

66. Voice of America, 7 July 2009.
67. Bennett, 2009.
68. McCrummen, 25 June 2009.
69. Reuters, 4 July 2009.
70. US Department of State, 2002.
71. The Foucault analogy is Marchal’s; see Marchal, 2007, p.1091f.; for more on Skinner’s
appraisal of the power of language, see Skinner, 2002, p. 7.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., p. 1093.
74. Crenshaw, 1981, p. 381.
75. Menkhaus, 2005, p. 40. It is noteworthy that the most recent US Military Report on Al-
Qaeda in the Horn of Africa appears to recognise this point, stating: ‘‘Al-Qaeda
operatives were so frustrated that they listed going after clan leaders as the second
priority for jihad.’’ Not unusually, the US military appears to be thinking well ahead of
its political class. See, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, 2007.
76. International Crisis Group, 12 December 2005, p. 1.
77. Menkhaus, 2002, pp. 110111.
78. Marchal, 2004, p. 125.
79. Bryden, 2003, p. 50.
80. Ibid., p. 27.
81. S Lone, conversation with the author, London, UK, 21 April 2007.
82. International Institute for Strategic Studies, Strategic Survey 2007, p. 257.
83. Bryden, 2003, p. 25.
84. Issa-Salwe & Ciisa-Salwe, , 2004, pp. 6061.
85. Hassan & Barnes, 2007.
86. Marchal, 2007. The token Somali government troops of the TFG presented further
evidence of clan-bias as these forces were picked exclusively from President Yusuf’s native
Puntland region.
87. Hassan & Barnes, 2007.
88. Ibid.
89. Senator Specter, 2002.
90. Following the May 2005 parliamentary elections in Ethiopia, for example, 193 people
were reported killed in an election that delivered an unprecedented number of seats to
opposition parties despite being pronounced unfair by international observers. After the
post-electoral crack-down, media access to the Ogaden, Oromia and Amhara regions was
restricted. See BBC News website, 19 October 2006.
91. Keller & Rothchild, 2007, p. 113.
92. Woodward, 2006, p. 144.
93. New York Times, 12 April 2007.
94. Marchal, 2007, p. 1105.
95. In April 2007, for example, Eritrea seceded from the Inter-governmental Authority on
Development in protest at Ethiopia’s occupation of Somalia; Al Jazeera, 22 April 2007.
96. McCrummen, 2007. Human rights groups have labelled the join operation a ‘decen-
tralized Guantanamo’.
97. Church, 2006.
98. Menkahus, 2007, p. 369.
100. Washington Post, 4 March 2008.
101. This section draws heavily on Roque’s article ‘Somalia: Understanding Al-Shabaab’. The
article also provides the following detail: ‘The Bay and Bakool command is led by
Mukhtar Robow (former spokesperson for Shabaab); the Juba command is led by
Hassan Al-Turki (although not directly affiliated to Shabaab); the Mogadishu Command
is apparently led by Sheikh Ali Fidow and three other commanders. Some of Al-
Shabaab’s top commanders are originally from relatively stable regions of the country,
including Abu Zubeyr and Ibrahim Haji Jaama ‘al-Afghani’, who are both from
Somaliland, and notorious commander and Swedish national Fuad Mohamed Shangole.’
102. Gettleman, 2 June 2009.
103. See, for example, Zartman, 1989 (updated version); and Crooke, 2009.
104. Marchal, 2007, p. 1103f.
105. See, for example, Al-Jazeera Online, 15 August 2009.
106. Marchal, 2007, p. 1103f
107. Gettleman, 23 May 2009.
109. Gettleman, 23 May 2009.
110. Roland Marchal, email correspondence with the author, 30 July 2009.
111. McCrummen, 7 August 2009.
113. Roland Marchal, email correspondence with the author, 30 July 2009.
114. Ken Menkhaus, email correspondence with the author, 2 August 2009.
115. Ibid.
116. UN Security Council, 20 July 2009, pp. 12.
117. Ibid.
118. Kippen, 2009, p. 12.
119. The following section draws on the excellent account in De Waal’s ‘Class and Power in a
Stateless Somalia’, 2007.
120. Stewart, 2009.
121. Ibid.
122. Ibid.
123. Ibid.
124. See, for example, Collier et al., 2003.
125. Marchal, 2002, pp. 118.
126. Ould-Abdallah, 2008, p. 3. The figures are taken from the World Bank and the
Economist Intelligence Unit
127. De Waal, 2007. See also Bradbury, 2008; and Jhazbhay, 2009.
128. De Waal, 2007.
129. Ibid.
130. Ibid.
131. Ibid.
132. Jopson, 2007.
133. De Waal, 2007.
134. Ould-Abdallah, 2008, p. 8.
135. Marhcal, 2007, p. 1093.
136. Marchal, 2007, p. 1105.
137. De Waal & Salam, 2004, p. 236.
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Elliot&Holzer 2009 The Invention of Terrorism in Somalia

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South African Journal of International Affairs

Vol. 16, No. 2, August 2009, 215244

The invention of ‘terrorism’ in Somalia: paradigms and policy in US

*Corresponding author. Email: aelliot08@johnshopkins.it

ISSN 1022-0461 print/ISSN 1938-0275 online

government with the moribund Transitional Federal Government (TFG). In

Somalia since 9/11

The Islamic Courts

Insurgency and external intervention

Whether US support was the determining factor in the Ethiopian decision to

The Djibouti Agreement

expansion of the parliament by 275 seats in order to combine existing representatives

The sectarian dimension

Stalemate: the equilibrium of 2009

In the light of an emboldened insurgency, the interim government is beginning to

The humanitarian crisis

The international dimension

Fighting terror, chasing shadows

Interest-groups and Islamism: the clan connection

The instrumentality of ‘terror’

Beyond Leviathan: the political economy of statelessness119

The sum of this assorted sweep of state-building assumptions is an instinctive

using force; attempting to do so would renew the Shabaab’s claim to Somali

20. Menkhaus, 2007, p. 369.

65. Shabelle Media Network, 23 April 2009.

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