Somalia ICU takeover: The courts of Somali opinion

Their guns are bigger

While the world’s political attention has been focused on Iraq for the past few weeks, a quiet revolution of sorts has been happening in Somalia, the east African state without a functioning government since the 30 year reign of Mohammad Siad Barre ended in 1991. Since then, a handful of warlords have presided over anarchy and lawlessness, famously drawing in the US for its disastrous “Black Hawk Down” battle with Mohammad Farah Aideed in 1993. Poverty, piracy, and a strangely efficient telecoms industry ensued. This week, the Islamic Courts Union, a network of Somalian sharia courts with a growing military, captured Jowhar, a Mogadishu suburb that represented the last stand for the warlords. The ICU had succeeded in part by transcending clan loyalties through religion. With it came the lions share of the country’s military hardware and effective control of Somalia by a single organisation for the first time in 15 years. The warlords themselves had seen the ICU coming over the past few years, forming The Alliance for Peace and Counter-Terrorism, a group tailor made for seeking (and receiving) covert CIA monetary assistance (if you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em). This was no minor annoyance to the UN recognised fledgling Somali government (which includes Aideed’s US-educated son), watching helplessly from the town of Baidoa, 90 miles from Mogadishu. Now, the US has called for a public international meeting to discuss the matter, fearing the ICU could turn Sufi-oriented Somalia into another Afghanistan. Claims have been made that Saudi-style public executions have been held and areas under ICU control harbour suspects from the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the Mombassa hotel bombing in 2002. But other analysts point out that the ICU is no Taliban. “Somalis in general show little interest in jihadi Islamism; most are deeply opposed,” says a report by the International Crisis Group. “The most remarkable feature is that Islamist militancy has not become more firmly rooted in what should, by most conventional assessments, be fertile ground.” Others liken the public mood to the election of Hamas in Palestine (for anti-Fatah corruption reasons) by a population that would likely approve a referendum for a two-state solution. Whatever the eventual outcome, the ascendance of the ICU is an embarrassment to the US, which still seems to prefer perpetuating a sense that Somalis prefer exporting jihadi violence to restoring order after over a decade of anarchy perpetuated by the CIA backed warlords. “It’s a turning point for Somalia,” said a businessman in Marka, south of Mogadishu. “We just don’t know yet which way our country will turn.”

Zahed Amanullah is associate editor of altmuslim.com. He is based in London, England.