Dilemmas of the Horn

The jihadist leads a double life. By day he's a government functionary in the Somali capital of Mogadishu. Standing in the shade of a crumbling, Mussolini-era balcony, a phone headset clipped to his ear, he affects a casual, corporate air. But then he pulls his blue oxford shirt aside to reveal a fresh bullet scar. He spies on his co-workers, he admits, and feeds information about them to the Islamist rebels who are laying siege to Mogadishu. "God willing, we'll take over the country soon," he tells a NEWSWEEK reporter, one of the few Western journalists who have ventured into Somalia in months. The State Department recently added al-Shabaab (meaning "youth") to its list of terrorist organizations, making the group a target for attacks by U.S. forces operating in the Horn of Africa. The jihadist is unconcerned. "We're like a centipede," he says. "You cut off one of our legs, we just keep going."

Unfortunately, he's probably right. In late 2006 the United States backed Ethiopia's incursion into Somalia, designed to oust the Islamic Courts Union, the Islamist coalition that had taken over much of the overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim country. (Al-Shabaab was the Courts' military wing.) Washington accused the Islamists of harboring Qaeda operatives involved in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But the Courts had also brought more stability than Somalia had enjoyed in years. Somalis could walk the streets and do business again, and many welcomed the Islamists just as war-weary Afghans hailed the Taliban in the 1990s.

Now, by trying to prevent another terrorist haven like Afghanistan from developing, America may have helped create another Iraq, this one in the volatile Horn of Africa. "Every year this fighting continues, the situation worsens," says Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Abdul Salaam of Somalia's Transitional Federal Government. The Islamists' eviction in 2006 left a power vacuum that the U.N.-backed government still hasn't managed to fill. Ethiopian troops are loathed as occupiers and rarely leave their heavily fortified bases. And al-Shabaab has broken off from the Courts to wage a brutal and effective insurgency. The guerrillas have overrun at least eight Somali towns this year and control parts of the capital. Where once they brought order to Somalia, they now gleefully spread chaos.

Mogadishu looks like Baghdad during its darker days. Thousands of Ethiopian soldiers are hunkered down behind sandbags, concrete barriers and heavy artillery. Whenever they go out on patrol, their heavily armored convoys are blasted by roadside bombs, rockets and small arms fire. In recent weeks, al-Shabaab has stepped up a suicide-bombing campaign; an attack last week targeted a compound housing African Union peacekeepers, wounding nine and killing one. Leaflets warning of death to government collaborators likewise recall Iraq.

For ordinary Somalis, violence is ever-present and random. Mogadishu is cut up into fiefdoms more than neighborhoods, divided by checkpoints and patrolled by militias that claim varying degrees of loyalty to the government. Death can come from many quarters. Two weeks ago, when insurgents attacked the presidential palace with rockets, Ethiopian troops responded with a mortar volley into the crowded Bakara market. Seventeen people were killed and nearly 50 others were injured. Shrapnel struck shopkeeper Abdul Rashid, 25. "In your country, do you throw mortars at your own people?" he asked from his hospital bed, wincing from a clear plastic tube inserted into his ribcage. Some 600,000 have fled the country in the past year, and 750,000 are now trapped in squalid camps for the internally displaced.

Whereas in Baghdad the surge is beginning to have an effect, the violence in Somalia is increasingly random and getting worse. Noor Muktar, 35, was living in Mogadishu's sports stadium with other refugees when a fire fight broke out two months ago. She fled with her daughters—"I couldn't even get our bedding," she says—and now lives on the outskirts of town in a teetering shelter of twigs and plastic. Aid workers are being driven out of the country. Three staff members from Doctors Without Borders were killed earlier this year by a roadside bomb. As of last week two humanitarian contractors, a Brit and a Kenyan, remained hostage after being taken at gunpoint on April 1. Foreign U.N. officials are prohibited from overnighting in Mogadishu. Aid agencies stopped delivering bulk food shipments in many areas of the capital after a Somali government official told radio listeners to seize food from convoys by force. A recent U.N. report declared Somalia's humanitarian crisis the worst in Africa.