We must address psychosocial causes of radicalisation to fight terrorism

What prompted Mohammed Abdirahim Abdullahi, a law student with a bright future, to massacre fellow university students in Garissa? This is the million-dollar question everyone is asking.

The theory that Al-Shabaab recruits are mostly poor, uneducated youth was shattered by the slick and smart 27-year-old terrorist, who is believed to be the ringleader of the attack.

It is often assumed that Al-Shabaab recruits come from underprivileged backgrounds. However, more recent studies indicate that it is not so much poverty that determines who will become a jihadist but social and psychological factors.

When author James Fergusson tracked down families of Somalis in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who had lost a relative to Al-Shabaab, he found that many of the recruits came from single-parent homes where a father-figure was missing, either because of death, divorce, or abandonment.

Local radical imams often replaced these absentee fathers and helped to initiate young recruits into the Al-Shabaab fold.

Trauma and dislocation caused by the civil war in Somalia exacerbate feelings of alienation and powerlessness among young American Somalis. This void is often filled by either joining a street gang or signing up with Al-Shabaab.

Broken families and lack of a male parental figure seem to come up again and again as conditions for radicalisation. When researcher Anneli Botha of the Institute of Security Studies interviewed radicalised youths in Kenya who were associated with Al-Shabaab, she found that nearly one-fifth of them had grown up without a father figure.

LOST THEIR FATHERS

Among these, the majority had lost their fathers before they reached the age of 20, though some were also orphans who had lost both parents before reaching adulthood.

Those who grew up with a father reported that he was autocratic and made all the rules, with mothers having little say in how to raise their own children.

This raises another issue that was recently brought to my attention by a woman at a workshop discussing gender-based violence in Mogadishu. She told me that when a Somali woman marries into another clan, her children are not considered part of her clan, but that of her husband.

She said that if women had more say in Somali society, there would be no conflict and no Al-Shabaab in Somalia because women are in effect “clanless” and generally not part of polarised clan-based politics. This makes them natural peacemakers.

Although prolonged conflict and displacement have shifted gender roles, with an increasing number of women becoming the main breadwinners for their families, the basic values attached to gender identity among Somalis remain unchanged, according to a study by CISP and International Alert.

Women are still considered inferior even with their status as breadwinners and men still control and dominate the political sphere.

CONSIDERED INFERIOR

Women from minority clans who live in refugee camps or camps for internally displaced people are particularly vulnerable to violence, including rape, as they are considered inferior on two counts — their gender and their clan.

Thus, rape of such women is not considered rape and goes largely unreported and unpunished, say the study’s authors.

The lack of a political voice extends also to minority clans and clans that have been deliberately excluded from the political process. This has been cited as a reason for the continuation of the conflict in Somalia as large powerful clans compete with each other for a bigger share of the political and economic pie, leaving weaker or less influential clans out of the equation.

Some believe that politically excluded clans in Jubaland, who oppose interim president Ahmed Madobe, an Ogaden who is allied to the Kenyan Somali political elite and who is the comrade-in-arms of the Kenyan forces in southern Somalia, are joining Al-Shabaab in, as one Somali put it, “an asymmetric warfare that remains the only option for ignored voices”.

It is rumoured that aggrieved clans are linking with terrorist militia to assert their respective clan’s authority in Jubaland.

Unfortunately, by allying itself with just one clan — the Ogaden — Kenya became a partisan player in Somalia’s divisive clan politics and, therefore, lost credibility as a neutral party in the eyes of most Somali people.

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