How Al-Shabaab plotted its own slow but sure downfall

On the morning of December 3, 2009, an al Shabaab militant dressed as a woman walked into a graduation ceremony at the Hotel Shamo in downtown Mogadishu and detonated his payload.

In the wake of the blast, 24 people lay dead, including three cabinet ministers of the Transitional Federal Government.

It looked like a big propaganda coup for al Shabaab considering the number of senior government officials either killed or injured.

Instead, it proved to be one of the critical turning points that led to the decline of the militant group and its eventual retreat from Mogadishu under pressure from African Union troops.

There is agreement among military historians that few insurgencies that retain the support of the population in the areas in which they operate can be defeated by a foreign army.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have proved a resilient foe to NATO troops because they have the solid support of the Pashtun community in the mountains of Kandahar, and the failure of Americans and others to win over the locals explains the faltering state of the war effort there.

In Iraq, the tide turned in 2006 after the “Anbar Awakening” when local Sunnis, fed up with the daily cycle of violence, turned against al- Qaeda and decided to take up the fight to root out the militants.

The Mau Mau in Kenya fought the British to a grinding draw because right until the end of the Emergency, their supporters among the population, including women and children, continued supplying the fighters along forest routes that the British never could comprehensively tackle.

Somalia’s al Shabaab enjoyed broad support when their precursors, the Islamic Courts Union, swept to power and routed the warlords in 2005/6.

They established relative order despite imposing a harsh brand of Islam to which most Somalis are not accustomed.

But the character of the movement changed gradually when dozens of foreign fighters began to show up in Somalia, some fleeing from a stepped-up campaign of drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan under the Obama administration and some reacting to a call to arms by some Shabaab militants to Somalis in the diaspora.

Before that, the principal aims of al Shabaab had been nationalist. The movement’s original leaders like Mukhtar Robow, whose clan supplied many of the fighters in the group, stated their goal as the establishment of a government guided by Sharia law for all Somalia.

Things began to change when the foreigners, with their superior financial resources, became the pre-eminent group in the Shabaab.

This camp promoted a Somali national and veteran of the Afghanistan training camps, Ahmed Abdi Godane, to be the leader of the group.

A far more radical figure, he declared that the Shabaab was not just fighting to lead Somalia but was a part of the global Jihad.
More nationalist leaders like Robow were gradually sidelined by the foreigners.

The Shabaab’s methods, too, began to change. Suicide bombings had been alien to Somalia and had never been a weapon deployed by the various forces vying for control there for decades.

That weapon was imported from the Gulf by foreign fighters, and al Shabaab used it for the first time in September 2006.

At first, the Shabaab militants mainly targeted government officials and installations. When they began to launch mass attacks in which dozens were killed, the public mood hardened against them.

This is how Mohamoud Farah Egal, an aviation official who has observed the battles in Somalia over the last five years at close range, summed it up.

“The Islamic Courts Union did some good things. Everyone was happy to see the defeat of the warlords. But then some elements took over and began killing without any regard for the sanctity of life. People began to see that this is not religion but something else.”

The attack on the Shamo Hotel shocked Somalis at a number of levels. One of the issues was the profile of the victims. It is a considerable feat to educate a child up to university in any part of Africa, but in Somalia it is an almost miraculous achievement.
A university professor who declined to be named for this article pointed out that two of the students who died on their big day were the sons of a woman who had raised them alone from income she earned hawking miraa (khat).

Another aspect of that attack that changed perceptions about the Shabaab was that the most prominent casualty of the bombing was one of Somalia’s most respected Islamic clerics.

Prof Sheikh Ibrahim Hassan Addow, who presided over the graduation ceremony as the minister for Higher Education, was one of the dozens of Somalis who abandoned a comfortable life in the US to return to his country to contribute to the peace process.

He was a leader of the Islamic Courts Union before joining the government after the 2008 Djibouti Accord.

His pedigree was unquestioned, and his nationalist and religious credentials almost unparalleled. His death intensified questions about the motives of the Shabaab in Somalia and beyond.

In Nairobi’s Eastleigh estate, the Somali poet Abdirashid Omar, 28, recorded a poem that featured these words on YouTube about the Shamo blast.

“The calamity that befell Mogadishu in which educated youths at the tender age of their life, who were expecting to be congratulated for graduating but instead the heartless misfits/crazy gangs marred the occasion with a suicide bombing that left many in tears and missing limbs. Ooh wrecked Somalis, what other incident is uglier than the calamity that befell Mogadishu.”

Omar was forced to go into hiding after receiving death threats from the Shabaab. But the stubborn questions among Somalis about the Shamo blast did not go away and came to serve as a major counterpoint to the claims by Shabaab leaders to be on the side of the Somali people.

In the months that followed, al-Shabaab gradually began to attract criticism from even some of the clerics who had initially supported them and who now questioned their efforts to impose the puritanical Salafi Islam ideology.

“The law comes from the people,” says Mr Egal. “The people must accept it. You cannot bring a law from outside and impose it on the people.”

It is probably not a coincidence that the biggest battlefield gains of the African Union troops came from the beginning of 2010 to last August when the Shabaab backbone was broken, and they were forced to abandon fixed positions in the Somali capital and engage in a chaotic retreat to the outskirts of the city.

While al-Shabaab were alienating the local population, the Ugandan and Burundian troops looked for ways to show that they were on the side of the civilians.

They did not do that only by the standard methods of providing field hospitals and water to residents.

They also began to hold to account soldiers accused of attacking civilians. Three of them were sentenced to two years in jail for incidents that occurred in November 2010 and January 2011, addressing in the process a major complaint by residents.

“At first the local population was sceptical,” Major-General Fred Mugisha, African Union Mission (Amisom’s) force commander said. “But we gradually won them over and showed them that we were pursuing the same goal: peace and a city free of al-Shabaab. The trust between the two sides has only grown over time. Now, we are able to prevent between 60 to 70 per cent of attacks from planted improvised explosive devices purely out of tips from the public.”

As the epic battle between the Shabaab and the AU forces progressed, the militants committed two more blunders that further eroded their support.

When the rains failed in mid-2011, and the farmers in the Shabelle River bread basket region found they could not produce enough to feed hundreds of thousands in the country, the Shabaab reacted by banning foreign aid agencies from supplying relief food.

This drew condemnation from many quarters, including important clan elders and community leaders.

Sheikh Bashir Ahmed Salat, the chairman of the Somali Islamic Clerics Consortium, warned the Shabaab that they risked having the deaths of famine victims on their hands.

“We are strongly denouncing the evil acts of al-Shabaab. They banned the humanitarian agencies from the areas which are under their tyrannical rule, when of course there is stern prolonged drought in the country. They have also imposed intolerable rules on the inhabitants in their areas. We put heavy responsibility upon their shoulders for whatever casualties the inhabitants in their regions will sustain,” he said.

The second blunder came in October when another suicide bombing, this time far larger than the Shamo Hotel bombing and again targeting aspiring young Somalis seeking a better life, took place in Mogadishu.

The attack targeted youths lining up at the ministry of Education seeking scholarships to study in Turkey. The Turks have taken a prominent role in the reconstruction of Somalia. That massive bombing killed 65 people and drove another wedge between the Shabaab and the Somali people. It was ironic that al-Shabaab were basically committing political suicide every time they sent a suicide bomber to attack ordinary civilians.

The result was that the AU troops were welcomed in every district they captured, and according to a Somali journalist who has covered the conflict from Mogadishu, residents for the first time began criticising Shabaab openly in the streets, a sign that they saw the militants’ gradual defeat as irreversible.

Reports of divisions within the ranks of the Shabaab began to circulate with rival camps said to be tipping off the TFG troops leading to the killing of several top commanders.

Within the space of only a few months, top al-Qaeda representatives in Somalia – Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and his Lebanese-British successor Bilaal Al-Berjawi – were killed outside Mogadishu.

On the battlefield, district after district fell to the AU troops, including some of the most important Shabaab command and control centres like the former Ministry of Defence headquarters in Geshandigga, the Shabaab fortress, which had been the national stadium, and the Barakaat Cemetery.

Loss of territory was accompanied by loss of income. The exit from the pivotal Bakaara market, for example, robbed the Shabaab of an installation where they derived, according to United Nation estimates, up to a third of their income.

Air attacks

When the Shabaab started to pull out of Mogadishu in August, they hoped to find a safe haven in Jubbaland near the Kenyan border.
Kenya’s unexpected entry into the conflict with air attacks and a naval blockade of Shabaab’s second major source of income – the port of Kismayu – further compounded matters.

And to complete the perfect storm of factors working against Shabaab, the string of uprisings convulsing the Middle East and North Africa meant that the group’s financial benefactors found themselves with their hands full dealing with the instability at home.
As all these events were unfolding in the battlefield, the lives of untold thousands of Somalis were being scarred – and will probably continue to be scarred – in tragic ways by the conflict.

Al-Shabaab is certainly a weakened force, but it is not a vanquished foe. It retains the capacity to carry out major suicide bombings in Somalia, East Africa and beyond despite its diminished fighting force on the battleground.

And in Somalia, the damage done to the population by this conflict and many more before it will take decades to repair.

Normal country

Mahamud Abdikadir Abdi, to take but one example, is 14 years old, but he looks like a seven-or eight-year-old boy might in a normal country.

He is small, incredibly thin and expressionless; his tiny frame resting on a stretcher while flies hover around in lazy fashion at a field hospital near the Mogadishu airport.

Abdikadir was one of those who fell victim to the puritanical rules imposed by the Shabaab.

While playing a video game in the Medina district about eight months ago, a suspected al Shabaab militant surfaced at the window and emptied his rifle into the hall.

Abdikadir was one of the teens who suffered gunshot wounds. The first bullet hit him in the pelvic area and another registered just above the knee. The youth cut a pitiful figure knowing his life will never be the same.