Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 52, no. 1, February–March 2010, pp. 27–38
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Somalia’s chronic governance and security problems started in 1991, when strongman President Mohammed Siad Barre was overthrown in a civil war. Competing clans then commandeered weapons supplied to his government alternately by the Soviets and the Americans during the Cold War, and proceeded to carve the country up into armed clan fiefdoms without central authority. Then came the famine that an ineffectual United Nations mission was unable to address, prompting the United States to lead an international military intervention in December 1992 with the relatively narrow intention of facilitating humanitarian relief, though in the grander service of a ‘new world order’.
By blurring the line between humanitarian work and coercive peace enforcement, however, the United States angered Somali clan militias. Their fury culminated in the infamous October 1993 ‘Black Hawk Down’ confrontation in which 18 US Army Rangers and hundreds of Somalis died. This disaster spurred a hurried American withdrawal, stoked anti-Americanism, and strengthened al-Qaeda’s hand in East Africa. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri have often cast the US as a ‘paper tiger’ with no staying power, and one of their favourite pieces of evidence is the American pull-out from Somalia after ‘Black Hawk Down’.
Threat perceptions and realities
Since 1991, some 14 governments formed in exile have tried and failed to govern Somalia, though the latest one – the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) – remains intact. From the mid 1990s, Somalia has been viewed as a potential exporter of Islamist terrorism. Western threat perceptions have been high since the 11 September attacks, and especially since the defeat of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in late 2001. The standing fear has been that al-Qaeda hold-outs fleeing Central Asia would reconstitute their operational base in weak states in the Persian Gulf or sub-Saharan Africa. Pakistan’s utility as an alternative base for al-Qaeda moderated these fears, but recent counter-terrorism successes there have revived them. Yemen is the leading candidate for such jihadist migration, particularly in light of al-Qaeda’s destabilising activities there in late 2009 and early 2010. Somalia, however, appears to be a fairly close second given its homogeneous Sunni Muslim population, absence of state enforcement mechanisms, incrementally rising militant Islamism and proximity to the Persian Gulf.
Islamist elements in Somalia have helped propagate terrorism. The explosives used in the December 2002 attack on Israeli tourists in Mombasa, Kenya, probably came from Somalia, and perpetrators of that attack and the nearly simultaneous attempted shoot-down of an Israeli airliner leaving Mombasa used Somalia as a bolt-hole. A number of Somalis reportedly went to Lebanon to help Hizbullah battle Israeli forces in the 2006 ‘summer war’ in exchange for military training. The Somali diaspora is large and widespread, and repatriates up to $700 million to $1 billion a year through hard-to-monitor hawala remittance vehicles. Thus, the diaspora is a potential terrorist support network and recruiting pool, especially if Somali expatriates see their host nations and allies as harming their country or countrymen.
The al-Qaeda-linked militant Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab (‘the youth’) has transnational…
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Jonathan Stevenson is a Contributing Editor to Survival and Professor of Strategic Studies at the US Naval War College. A version of this essay was presented at a meeting of the European Security Forum at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels in November 2009.
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