The Future is Now: Somalia in the New World Order

By Douglas Farah

The recent, audacious hijacking of a Saudi oil tanker by Somali pirates, with at least some of the ransom money destined for Islamist militants, shows just how quickly the future has arrived.

The criminal-terrorist groups on the Somali coast (largely controlled by radical Islamists of the al-Shabaab group, a self-declared affiliate of al Qaeda central) have in essence declared themselves at war as a joint enterprise, against the rest of the world. Even the Saudis are angry enough to try to join international efforts to combat the groups fed by their own theological teachings.

These loose-knit groups now join the FARC in Colombia, the Taliban in Afghanistan/Pakistan and others as full-fledged terrorist-criminal enterprises that are the future. I have long warned that this threat will, unfortunately, have to be a tier-one priority for the incoming administration. These latest developments show just how dangerous it is to not deal with these issues in their infancy.

Unlike the FARC and Taliban, which rely on drugs, the Somali groups have used innovative thinking to generate their wealth. This too, is what we will see more and more of, as groups intersect along the terrorist-criminal pipeline and find overlapping interests and talents.

They took what was at hand, a vital artery in world commerce-including oil shipments-and found the weakness in the system, namely, a complete lack of protection of valuable cargo flowing past them.

The pirates, acting largely from economic motives, now hold a staggering amount of wealth in their hands. The operative concern has to be not only the criminal funds, but the use of these funds to arm and support radical Islamists. Al-Shabaab is likely to share the wealth, and we will see them suddenly armed with new, sophisticated weapons and communications as they move to finish off the weak and ineffective transitional government.

Already the hijackings are having a huge effect on commerce through one of the most obvious choke points in the world's shipping commerce. My full blog is here.

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