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Authors: James Fergusson

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‘We are certain that there is a hit squad targeting Muslim clerics and other Muslims perceived to be extremists,’ Ahmed told reporters.
¹⁰

I never did get to witness the liberation of Kismayo. Sheikh Moalim’s offer of a lift to Dhobley suddenly seemed much less attractive when, two days after my meeting with him, a combined KDF/Raskamboni convoy struck an IED on the road east of Garissa, killing three. Flying was the only sensible way of reaching the war from Nairobi. But the Kenyan colonels remained uncooperative to the last on this score, and in the end I reluctantly abandoned my attempt to persuade them.

In terms of the wider story, it probably didn’t much matter. The fall of Kismayo was really a foregone conclusion; and al-Shabaab was surely finished in any case as an occupying military force, let alone as a viable alternative system of government for Somalia. The more important question was what would happen next, to which the unrest in Kenya in the summer of 2012 provided one chilling answer. As a rallying point for disaffected young Muslims, al-Shabaab was evidently as potent in Mombasa as it once was in Mogadishu. ‘Their intention,’ said the prime minister, Raila Odinga, ‘is to divide the people of Mombasa into Christians and Muslims with the sole aim of creating an inter-religious conflict.’
¹¹The use of grenades, he added, proved that the riots had been planned, the work of a sinister (but unidentified) ‘hidden hand’.

Was Odinga right? Whether or not the unrest was orchestrated, in 2012 the Swahili coast looked more and more like another new battleground in the long war between Islamists and infidels – the beginning by other means, perhaps, of al-Shabaab’s breakout from the Horn of Africa. Just as US forces failed to close the net on the Taliban and al-Qaida in Kandahar in 2001, allowing them to
escape over the border to Pakistan to fight another day, so it was feared that the cream of al-Shabaab’s foreign fighters had already abandoned Kismayo. News reports suggested that many had fled north across the Gulf of Aden, at night and by speedboat, to join the al-Qaida-linked separatists in south Yemen. Gandhi’s sources had told him that al-Shabaab were in fact dispersing to all points of the compass. Some were said to have gone north, to Puntland’s inaccessible Galgala Mountains, in order to join forces with Sheikh Atom, a pro-al-Shabaab separatist who had been harrying the Garowe government for years. Others had sought sanctuary in the Somali tribal areas of Ethiopia, or were hiding even further west in the impenetrable jungles of ‘Zaire’, the old Portuguese name for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But most of all, according to Gandhi, they had come south to Kenya, filtering down the Swahili coast via Lamu, or along any of the inland routes across the long and porous border.

‘There are many, many Kenyans fighting for al-Shabaab,’ he said.

Local Somali fighters, meanwhile, naturally had an easier alternative than flight, which was to hide their guns, shed whatever scraps of uniform they possessed, and melt back into the population from which they came.

Kismayo’s fall signalled the end of the conventional military campaign, but Mogadishu has barely begun the task of filling the enormous vacuum of governance the Islamists have left behind. The implications for the security of the East Africa region, and the world, are huge; and Somalia, the wellspring of so much human misery and political instability, looks to be a contender once again for that unenviable title,
The World’s Most Dangerous Place
.

*
David Tebbutt, a 58-year-old publishing director from Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire, was shot dead as he tried to resist his assailants. His wife Judith was released six months later following payment of a reported $1m ransom.

*
Nabhan survived until 2009, when he was finally tracked down and killed in the al-Shabaab-controlled port of Baraawe by a helicopter-borne squad of US Navy SEALs.

*
Some 1.25 million foreigners visited Kenya in 2011, bringing in a record $1.16bn in an industry that accounted for 11 per cent of the country’s GDP – the second biggest source of foreign revenue after the export of tea, according to
Bloomberg.com
.

Notes and Sources

Introduction

1
According to Reuters, whose source was ‘a Western diplomat’, quoted by Jerome Starkey in
The Time
s, 11 September 2011

2

The Time
s, 8 October 2011

3
ICM/
Guardian
, 10 August 2012

4
Martin Fletcher,
The Times
, 6 August 2012

Chapter 1 An African Stalingrad: The war against al-Shabaab

1
‘The Family House’ in the Swiss-based European Graduate School’s
Transition
magazine, no. 99, 2008, pp6–15

Chapter 2 At the Bancroft Hotel: America’s proxy war

1

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11246394

2
See, for instance, Prof. Chester Crocker of Georgetown University,
Foreign Affairs Magazine
, vol. 73, no. 3, 1995, often reprinted, e.g. at
www.pbs.org
. Operation Restore Hope is often described as the first American troop deployment in Africa since the Barbary Wars of the early 1800s

3

http://www.state.gov/p/af/rls/rm/2010/138314.htm

4
,
5
Jeffrey Gettleman,
New York Times
, 10 August 2011, ‘US Relies on Contractors in Somalia Conflict’

6
Josh Kron, Associated Press, 12 July 2010; BBC, 12 July 2010

7
UPDF Brigadier Paul Lokech interviewed by Andrew M. Mwenda in the
Kampala Independent
, 25 August 2012

8
Tony Doyle, BBC News Africa, 26 June 2012

9
Gerald Hanley,
Warriors – Life and Death among the Somalis
, Hamish Hamilton 1971

Chapter 3 The field hospital: What bombs and bullets do to people

1

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14985549
, 20 September 2011

2
Richard Burton,
First Footsteps in East Africa
, 1856

3
Harald Swayne,
Seventeen Trips through Somaliland and a Visit to Abyssinia
, preface to the 3rd ed., Rowland Ward Ltd 1903

4
A declassified Memorandum of Conversation that took place between Acting Foreign Minister H.A. Kassim and Secretary of State Kissinger on 8 October 1976; PA/HO Department of State EO12958, as amended 4 May 2006

Chapter 4 Aden’s story

1

http://www.sunatimes.com/view.php?id=564
, May 2011

2
,
3
,
4

http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/World_News_3/article_2716.shtml

5

http://www.b.dk/danmark/en-terrorist-fra-roedovre

6
Xan Rice,
Guardian
, 20 October 2010

7
John Lee Anderson,
New Yorker
, 14 December 2009

8
For more detail on the Aweys story see:
http://ashaacira.wordpress.com/taariikhda-shiikh-uweys-axmad-oo-looyaqaano-sheekh-aweys-al-qaadirioo-somalida-intabada-diinta-gaarisiiyo-illaa-iyo-south-afrika/

9

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=91267

Chapter 5 The failure of Somali politics

1
Alex Athure,
Daily Nation
(Kenya), 9 July 2012

2

Suna Times
, 11 September 2011

Chapter 6 What makes al-Shabaab tick?

1
Telephone interview published in
Getting Somalia Wrong? Faith, War and Hope in a Shattered State
by Mary Harper, Zed Books 2012

2

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16920643

3

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/17/mi5-chief-somaliaterro-threat

4
David Barret,
Sunday Telegraph
, 7 July 2012

5
Nelly Lahoud, CTC
Sentinel
, February 2012, vol. 5, issue 2

6

http://www.somaliareport.com/index.php/post/976/Fazulrsquos_Last_Moments

7
CIA
World Factbook
2012

8
Hanley,
Warriors
, op. cit.

9
Reported by Mary Harper,
Getting Somalia Wrong?
, p91

10

Daily Mail
, 15 May 2011

11
For an introduction to this topic, see the excellent collection of essays
Suicide Bombers: The Psychological, Religious and Other Imperatives
, IOS Press, Nato Science for Peace and Security Series, E: Human and Societal Dynamics, vol. 41, edited by Mary Sharpe