Somalia: Is ‘Arming the Clans’ really enough to defeat Al-Shabaab? 

Al-Qaeda’s Somali offshoot Al-Shabaab has murdered scores of Somalis over the last decade. While President Mohamud’s vow to eradicate the terrorist organisation has been welcomed, Suhaib Mahamoud questions whether ‘arming the clans’ will be enough…

Somalia’s chronic instability is often described as complex, multi-faceted and difficult to understand. This is because for three decades, Somalia has continuously lurched from crisis to crisis. No sooner than the gunfire of warring clans had subsided, the jihadists flooded in. This was, of course, one toxic legacy of the physical and intellectual ruin engendered by the state’s collapse when the military dictatorship fell in 1991.

This is a response to general media coverage of the war raging in southern Somalia against terrorist group is the most powerful branch of Al-Qaeda today, and the foremost threat to Somalia’s security and that of the region. Al-Shabaab face a government-backed clan uprising in the regions it controls, which has reverberated across news and social media channels.

Valid questions

The government’s strategy raises questions, like: Why aren’t these militias being recruited to join the national army, bringing them under an official leadership? In fact, where is the Somali army – on whom $1.5 billion has been spent “without results” according to a US official? Moreover, why aren’t the 20,000 African Union Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS) soldiers being enlisted to fight, instead of sitting in their barracks receiving salaries five times that of Somali soldiers?.

But whoever poses these questions is accused of complicity with terrorism. The corrupt Somali political elites are driven by narrow clan interests. They are desperate, along with their Western allies – practised swindlers of “war on terror” strategies – to defend this war. Therefore, they ferociously attack anyone who points to flaws in the official narrative or its possible consequences.