Buscador avanzado

Somalia's President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud at the presidential palace in Mogadishu on 28 May. Photograph: Feisal Omar/Reuters

Development is complex, but in complexity there is an opportunity for innovation if the right partnerships are formed.

In Somalia, where the needs are extreme, multiple and urgent, there is no shortage of development projects, but more often than not, this dominates the global view of Somalia. However, this is not the full story.

Last week, Somalia held its first International Investment Conference. The day before I opened this historic gathering, there was a cowardly terrorist attack on a hotel near the presidential offices, which sadly claimed innocent lives and injured many more. I could hear the fighting from my offices and residencethroughout the night and the attack continued as the conference opened, coming to an end towards the early afternoon, thanks to the efforts of Somalia’s brave security forces.…  Seguir leyendo »

Police officers patrol by the wreckage of a car at the scene of suicide car bomb attack that targeted the city's police commissioner in Mogadishu, on July 10. AFP via Getty Images

The Taliban’s swift capture of power in Afghanistan took the world by surprise and triggered considerable introspection in the West about a 20- year conflict waged at immense human and material cost. More broadly, the outcome raises serious questions about the viability of internationally supported state-building projects, especially in the absence of an inclusive political settlement. This experience has ramifications well beyond Afghanistan, but perhaps nowhere are the parallels as striking as in Somalia.

Somalia bears many similarities to Afghanistan. In both countries, an Islamist governance project took root after a lengthy period of conflict, only to be dislodged by outside powers within the context of the global war on terrorism (the United States in Afghanistan and Ethiopia in Somalia).…  Seguir leyendo »

Map of Voting Locations in Somalia International Crisis Group

What’s new? The Al-Shabaab insurgency has threatened to disrupt Somalia’s high-stakes elections due by the end of February. The Islamic State’s local branch may also stage its own assaults. A larger number of polling stations than in previous elections means that militants will have a wider range of targets to choose from.

Why does it matter? Militant attacks and intimidation of delegates and candidates could reduce participation in the polls and undermine their legitimacy. A disrupted electoral contest would sharpen political discord in Somalia, which Al-Shabaab and the Islamic State can exploit, while undermining longer-term efforts at reconciliation.

What should be done? …  Seguir leyendo »

Soldiers sit at a watch post next to the runway inside Mogadishu airport’s secure perimeter, where international organizations such as the United Nations and European Union are based, in Mogadishu, Somalia. (Dai Kurokawa/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

On Oct. 13, al-Shabab sent mortar rounds into the United Nations base at the Mogadishu airport, one of the most fortified areas in Somalia. A July hotel attack and car bombing in a Somali port town left more than 26 dead. In May, al-Shabab detonated a car bomb near the presidential palace in Mogadishu, killing nine people.

Al-Shabab is an Islamist extremist group affiliated with al-Qaeda, seeking to oust the Western-backed federal government of Somalia and install an Islamic government instituting sharia law. Despite coalition efforts to counter this militant group, al-Shabab continues to demonstrate resiliency and the ability to launch attacks both domestically and cross-border into Kenya.…  Seguir leyendo »

The scene of a truck explosion in Mogadishu, Somalia, this month that killed more than 400 people. Credit Mohamed Abdiwahab/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On Oct. 14, a truck carrying about two tons of homemade explosives blew up near Zoobe Junction, one of the busiest streets in Mogadishu, the Somali capital. The blast sent shock waves for miles. More than 400 people were killed — nearly 150 of them burned beyond recognition — and hundreds wounded. Families wandered for hours searching for their loved ones in the rubble.

Hundreds of citizens lined up at hospitals for hours to donate blood. Doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers did all they could to rescue the wounded. Grieving and angry Somalis gathered on Zoobe Junction blamed Islamist Shabab militants for the atrocity.…  Seguir leyendo »

The aftermath of a truck bombing in Mogadishu, Somalia, on Oct. 14. Officials said the attack was carried out by the militant Islamic group Shabab. Feisal Omar/Reuters

One evening in August, I climbed onto a dusty old truck in the Dadaab refugee camp in the eastern Kenyan desert, about 50 miles from the border with Somalia. A tarpaulin in the truck bed covered the sacks of beans it was transporting to the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The driver readily picked up some passengers: four women and eight men for $60 each.

The women sat in the front beside the driver. I sat with the men on the tarpaulin. Six truck tires were strapped onto the tarp. We had to hold onto the tires to keep from falling off the truck as it bumped along a dirt road through a forest.…  Seguir leyendo »

Armed Cameroonian men in the rapid intervention battalion patrol in Waza, Cameroon, in May 2014. (AFP/Getty Images)

The United Nations proclaimed Oct. 2 as the International Day of Non-Violence, a reminder that it is irrational to use violence to promote peaceful societies. It’s also a reminder of the importance of accurate data on where and why violence occurs in the world, and where the threats are on the rise.

Since April 2016, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies has tracked the levels of attacks associated with all militant Islamist groups in Africa on a quarterly basis, using data compiled from the widely used Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) Project.

In a July 21 Monkey Cage post, Salem Solomon and Casey Frechette challenged the validity of an Africa Center analysis that noted that al-Shabab had surpassed Boko Haram as Africa’s most deadly militant Islamist group.…  Seguir leyendo »

Somali soldiers stand guard at the scene of a car bomb explosion near Mogadishu, Somalia, on July 12, 2017. Media outlets report that at least two people were killed when the car bomb went off at a checkpoint outside the Somali capital. (Said Yusuf Warsame/European Pressphoto Agency)

In May, a U.S. Navy SEAL was killed and two other U.S. service members were wounded on Somali soil. It was the first U.S. combat death in the East African country since 1993 — and it came amid ramped-up efforts to fight the deadly extremist group al-Shabab.

For years, Boko Haram has carried the dubious distinction of being Africa’s deadliest terrorist group. But a multinational task force has weakened the group. It has been crippled so badly that al-Shabab has emerged as Africa’s deadliest extremist group.

That is according to a report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies published in April.…  Seguir leyendo »

Students in Nairobi protest an attack by gunmen at the Garissa University College in April 2015. Al-Shabab asserted responsibility for the attack. (Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)

On June 14, the terrorist group al-Shabab — an al-Qaeda affiliate — attacked a pizza restaurant in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, by detonating a car bomb and sending in assailants. More than 30 people were killed. Earlier in June, al-Shabab overran a military base in the semiautonomous area of Puntland, killing dozens. The group recently surpassed Boko Haram as the deadliest terrorist organization in Africa.

But it’s not the violence that’s attracting followers. My recent field research in Kenya and Somalia, the two East African countries where al-Shabab is most active, suggests that al-Shabab is thriving because it’s still offering a comparatively attractive alternative to the Somali government.…  Seguir leyendo »

A firefighter trying to extinguish a fire after an attack by the Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab in Mogadishu, Somalia, last year. Credit Feisal Omar/Reuters

The Trump administration has made it clear that the United States will take a more aggressive approach to battling al-Shabaab extremists in Somalia.

In March, President Trump granted the military expanded authorities to operate in Somalia, paving the way for an accelerated military campaign.

By declaring parts of Somalia an “area of active hostilities,” Mr. Trump gave the Department of Defense authority to approve strikes without going through an Obama-era vetting process, which potentially lowers the bar for tolerance of civilian casualties. And the head of American forces in Africa, who advocated the change, said this would “allow us to prosecute targets in a more rapid fashion.”…  Seguir leyendo »

Map of Somalia. CRISIS GROUP

On 26 October, about more than 50 heavily-armed Somali Islamic State (IS) fighters seized Qandala, a sparsely populated town in Somalia’s Puntland federal state on a rugged mountainous coastal strip overlooking the Gulf of Aden. It was a small, but highly symbolic, step forward for the group and demonstrates again how armed extremists exploit state disorder and local tensions to develop safe havens and rebuild after otherwise debilitating defeats. Unless Puntland treats this threat seriously and resolves internal tensions like that in the Qandala area and conflicts with neighbouring federal states, IS in Somalia could grow in strength and destabilise much larger parts of Somalia.…  Seguir leyendo »

How big a threat is Al-Shabaab to the United States? Despite the Somali terrorist group's calls over the weekend for attacks on malls in the West, including the vast Mall of America in Minnesota, the group isn't much of a threat at all to Americans.

The reality is that Al-Shabaab has shown scant abilities to conduct operations outside of Somalia or neighboring countries such as Kenya. Indeed, the only operation anyone associated with the group has attempted in the West is when a Somali man armed with an ax in 2010 forced himself into the home of Kurt Westergaard -- a Danish cartoonist who had depicted the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban -- and tried unsuccessfully to break into the fortified safe room where Westergaard was hiding.…  Seguir leyendo »

In a videotaped announcement released earlier this month by the Al Qaeda chief, Ayman al-Zawahri, the group officially endorsed the struggling rebel group Shabab, which has been fighting the Western-backed transitional government and African Union peacekeepers in Somalia since 2007.

So might Somalia finally become what the West has always feared: Al Qaeda’s base in East Africa?

Unlikely. Paradoxically, stronger ties between Al Qaeda and the Shabab could weaken the Shabab and help counterterrorism efforts in Somalia by exacerbating internal tensions within the group.

Somalia has yet to live up to its imagined potential as a terrorist safe haven. In the 1990s, Al Qaeda’s efforts to develop operational networks there failed miserably, mostly because of its fractious and disloyal local allies.…  Seguir leyendo »

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain will convene a big international meeting on Somalia on Thursday. The tasks: stopping piracy in the Indian Ocean, uprooting terrorism, relieving a famine and ending a civil war. The approach: Western ships, U.S. drones, African soldiers and international money for the Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu.

This is all very laudable, except for one thing: It won’t work.

The transitional government, established in 2004, has no credibility, in part because it could not exist without foreign backing. In fact, many Somalis don’t want a central government. Or, to be exact, they are so embittered by their experience of centralized power that they would rather have no government than the type that their African neighbors and the West have designed for them.…  Seguir leyendo »

Tema: Al-Qaeda estableció una célula en Kenia a inicios de los 90. Al-Shabab se formó posteriormente en Somalia. Pero la relación entre ambas es muy estrecha, constituyendo una amenaza terrorista para la región del Este de África y más allá.

Resumen: El Este de África es desde el inicio de la década de los 90 un escenario particularmente significativo del terrorismo yihadista, aunque sea en estos momentos cuando adquiera una especial relevancia. Al-Qaeda estableció una célula en Kenia al poco de dar comienzo aquella década y desde entonces no ha dejado de constituir una amenaza para la estabilidad del país y su economía nacional.…  Seguir leyendo »

In 2006, the Bush administration declared Somalia the latest front in the war on terrorism: a newly influential movement, the Union of Islamic Courts, was suspected of playing host to Al Qaeda there. When this union took over the capital in June 2006, the United States tried to coax moderates within it to enter a dialogue with Somalia’s official government, a toothless institution that was exiled from the capital. But by December of that year, when the Islamic courts seemed about to take down the government entirely, neighboring Ethiopia convinced United States officials that allowing the courts to control Somalia would be tantamount to handing the country to Al Qaeda.…  Seguir leyendo »

I know the “spiritual leader” of the Somali militant group Al Shabab who exhorted his followers to attack East African targets days before bombers killed nearly 80 people watching the World Cup final in Kampala, Uganda, on July 11.

His name is Mukhtar Roobow Ali, and I know him because he once tried to kill me. In 2008 in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, his forces tried to blow up my TV crew’s vehicle with a roadside bomb. I often relive the memory of how the shock wave sucked air from my lungs and, as the smoke cleared, the sight of three innocent bystanders killed by the blast that missed us.…  Seguir leyendo »

Last Sunday, during the World Cup final, suicide bombers struck two targets in Kampala, Uganda, killing 74 people and turning a global celebration into an unspeakable tragedy. The Somali militant group al-Shabab has claimed responsibility for the attacks, which targeted both a rugby centre frequented by foreigners and an Ethiopian restaurant. The bombers targeted Uganda because it is a leader in the African Union-led military force in Somalia backing the country's unpopular and fragile western-supported government.

The bombings demonstrate that al-Shabab, the former militia wing of the Union of Islamic Courts – the ruling group deposed by the US and Ethiopia in late 2006 – is a potent force that has the ability to strike outside of the country.…  Seguir leyendo »

Has the world woken up to the risk coming from Somalia? The simultaneous bombing on Sunday in the Ugandan capital Kampala may be the start of a wave of violent terrorism in the Horn of Africa and beyond, waged from Somalia. The radical Somali group al-Shabab had already made public threats against Uganda and Burundi, the two African countries that have contributed troops to African peace mission in Somalia. Today its commander admitted responsibility for the bombs.

The threat of terrorism emanating from Somalia is real, and equal to that from Afghanistan. As in Afghanistan, few days go by without an act of terrorism targeting civilians.…  Seguir leyendo »

By Simon Tisdall (THE GUARDIAN, 03/03/06):

Somalia could become the next "war on terror" battleground as the US zeroes in on al-Qaida and Islamist groups reportedly trying to exploit a power vacuum in the world's most anarchic state. Looking on helplessly are two million Somalis facing drought and famine, and aid agencies hampered by warlords, kidnappings and piracy. The World Food Programme says a dire humanitarian situation in southern Somalia has been worsened by hijackings of relief vessels - but alternative land routes had raised "similar logistical and security challenges". An American employee of Unicef was kidnapped in the south on Wednesday.…  Seguir leyendo »