Murk of War

Reached by telephone in Mogadishu, Hussein Aidid, Somalia's current minister of interior, was forthright about acknowledging the U.S. presence in his country. "The U.S. had the capacity, and we didn't have the capacity, so they have come to help Ethiopian and TFG forces," Aidid said. "The Bush administration policy is to lead the war on terror. When their ground forces complete their mission in the south, they will leave. It will not take a long time, but it will take a couple of weeks." For Aidid, it's an ironic twist in fate. His late father was Mohammed Farrah Aidid, the warlord whose militiamen fought U.S. troops in Mogadishu at the time of the "Black Hawk Down" incident in 1993, when a ferocious battle led to the deaths of 18 American servicemen. More ironic still, Aidid fils himself was once a U.S. Marine who was part of Operation Restore Hope, serving in Mogadishu for the first 90 days of the U.S. mission in Somalia. He has joint U.S.-Somali citizenship. Aidid says if his father were alive today, he would heartily approve of the U.S. intervention in Somalia. "But he would never have allowed Al Qaeda to have these bases in Somalia, if he were alive they wouldn't have been able to buy a single rifle."

Aidid wouldn’t say how many U.S. forces were on the ground in Somalia but said they were part of a carrier-based task force and may also include some of the 1,700 U.S. troops stationed in Djibouti, the port city-state on the Horn of Africa. "The U.S. already knows about Somalia now, and they know what they are doing," he said.

The Islamic Courts Union swept to power early last year in Somalia, taking one town after another on a wave of revulsion by Somalis against the power of warlords like Aidid, who had divided the country and even its towns into heavily armed, largely lawless fiefdoms. The CIA secretly began financing some of those warlords, helping to form a front against the Islamists, but that only made them more popular in many quarters. The TFG, which brought some of the warlords and other factions into a government with international recognition but little popularity, was reduced to ruling only a small area around the provincial capital of Baidoa, surrounded by the ICU. Ethiopia threatened to intervene if Baidoa were attacked, but U.S. officials urged restraint. The Courts themselves were a mixed group, including some hard-line, pro-Al Qaeda elements but also many moderates, businessmen and clan elders. But its chairman and spiritual leader, Hussein Aweys, made no secret of his admiration of Osama bin Laden .

On Dec. 14, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Fraser made a speech condemning the ICU as Al Qaeda-controlled, a move widely interpreted as encouragement to Ethiopia to invade the country, which it did on Dec. 20, less than a week later. "That was the green light the Ethiopians needed," says John Prendergast, Africa director for the International Crisis Group. In 10 days, Ethiopia, which has the strongest military in the Horn, had subdued all of the south and central parts of Somalia (the north is controlled by the semiautonomous authorities of Puntland and Somaliland), and Courts authority had collapsed completely. "The Islamic Courts weren't routed," Prendergast says, "they just tactically withdrew. Why would these guys sacrifice thousands of their fighters when they could just go underground. The TFG has almost no military muscle of its own, it relies almost entirely on Ethiopia and a few warlords like Aidid." Once Ethiopia pulls out, the Courts will be in a position to try to undermine the TFG unless it broadens its base to include some of the powerful clans that previously supported the Islamic Courts—a move it has so far not made. "None of the factions in Somalia had the capacity to fight the terrorists without the joint operation with Ethiopia and the joint operation with the United States," Aidid said.

Ethiopian officials insist they'll leave Somalia soon, and most analysts don't expect them to undertake a long and messy occupation; popular feeling against them in Mogadishu especially runs very high, and there are nearly daily hit-and-run attacks on their troops and the TFG. When the TFG parliament met in Baidoa today, it couldn't even agree on a martial-law measure outlawing carrying arms—and police had to be called to restore order among angry legislators. As with the Americans in Iraq, the Ethiopians may find that invading and subduing the country is a lot easier than leaving it in one piece.

© 2007