Source: Baidoa Vulnerable, Islamic Courts Tactically Capable

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

I spoke with a military intelligence officer yesterday about the situation in Somalia. (For background on Somalia, see the Weekly Standard article that I co-wrote with Bill Roggio.) He said that he expects Somalia's transitional federal government (TFG) to fall once the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) begins its final push to overtake the TFG's capital of Baidoa. Although Ethiopian forces are currently protecting the TFG, there have been three major engagements between the Ethiopians and the ICU to date -- and the ICU emerged as the winner each time. This is noteworthy because standing armies usually beat irregular forces in open battle, but this has not been the case thus far in Somalia.

In terms of TTP (tactics, techniques, and procedures) the ICU is fighting more like the Iraqi insurgency than like the Chechens. Their TTP is also similar to that displayed by Hizballah in Lebanon. One clear implication of this is that foreign fighters are both present and influential in Somalia. At present, this point may no longer be worth making, since the presence of foreign fighters in Somalia is undeniable to any objective observer. The best estimate of foreign fighter presence is the figure of 1,000 contained in the confidential UN report that has been leaked to some media sources. These foreign fighters have been accessing Somalia through Yemen.

Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys (head of the ICU's consultative shura council) and his compatriots are some of the most capable jihadist leaders to date in terms of their ability to negotiate and their understanding of the need to control atrocities that would hurt them. The fact that we haven't seen the kind of excesses that the Taliban engaged in during its rise to power helps bolster the ICU's claim that they are a force for stability in Somalia. An example of the Taliban's atrocities can be seen in Ahmed Rashid's book Taliban, when he describes the August 1998 slaughter of Hazaras:

What followed was another brutal massacre, genocidal in its ferocity, as the Taliban took revenge on their losses the previous year. A Taliban commander later said that Mullah Omar had given them permission to kill for two hours, but they had killed for two days. The Taliban went on a killing frenzy, driving their pick-ups up and down the narrow streets of Mazar shooting to the left and right and killing everything that moved -- shop owners, cart pullers, women and children shoppers and even goats and donkeys. Contrary to all injunctions of Islam, which demands immediate burial, bodies were left to rot on the streets. "They were shooting without warning at everybody who happened to be on the street, without discriminating between men, women and children. Soon the streets were covered with dead bodies and blood. No one was allowed to bury the corpses for the first six days. Dogs were eating human flesh and going mad and soon the smell became intolerable," said a male Tajik who managed to escape the massacre.

Within jihadist circles, there is a general trend toward the more restrained model of the ICU and away from the Taliban's overt brutality. This trend can be glimpsed, for example, in the Iraq insurgency under the new leadership of Abu Ayyub al-Masri and also in Pakistan, where the jihadists are trying to co-opt a large segment of Pakistani society. This move toward a more restrained kind of fighting serves to the jihadists' advantage.

Another difference between the ICU and the Taliban on the battlefield is that the ICU is expanding rapidly, and isn't experiencing the kind of tactical setbacks that were typical of the Taliban's rise in the 1990s.

One clear indication of how precarious the TFG's situation is can be seen by the recent suicide bombing attempt and the attack on president Abdullahi Yusuf's convoy on September 18. The ICU has been getting attackers very close to the TFG. They're either able to assemble bombs inside Baidoa or else smuggle explosives into the city without being intercepted. Either way, it is not a good sign for the TFG. The TFG has only survived these two recent attacks because of luck, and luck will not hold out forever.

While the TFG is besieged, there is still a chance that the Ethiopians can shuttle them to safety in Ethiopia either before or else just as the ICU begins a full-scale attack on Baidoa. The ICU's attacks on the Ethiopians' supply convoys basically guarantees that the TFG has a blank check to enter Ethiopia for safe haven.

One critical question is how the Ethiopians will respond if and when the TFG falls. The Ethiopians are extremely concerned about the ICU because of the threats that Aweys has leveled against the Muslim parts of Ethiopia. The Ethiopians seem to possess the political willpower to intervene in Somalia. However, the Ethiopian military suffers from maladies common to African armies, such as nepotism, corruption, and a bad human rights record. This should give rise to concerns that an Ethiopian intervention could have an effect similar to that of the Russian intervention in Chechnya, where Russian brutality drove the population to become more sympathetic to the mujahideen.

TrackBack