American Islamist Killed as Somali Clashes Intensify

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Written by Benjamin Joffe-Walt
Published Sunday, September 06, 2009
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An American citizen who joined an Islamic insurgent group in Somalia was among ten people killed in violent clashes over the weekend.

Fighting began Friday night in the Somali capital after forces loyal to the shaky, Western-supported transitional government shot mortars at an insurgent base in the Somali capital Mogadishu. Clashes continued unabated on Saturday, ending in Al Shabaab insurgents recapturing the base and retaining their grip on most of the city.

Al Shabaab fighters said Mohamed Hassan, a 21-year old American from Minnesota, was among the dead. At the time of printing it was not clear when Mr Hassan had arrived in Somalia.

Al Shabaab, the militant wing of the Islamic Courts Union, a group that controlled Mogadishu prior to the invasion by Ethiopian forces, had made significant gains in the Horn of Africa nation. It now controls most of Mogadishu and Southern Somalia.

The government has pledged to drive Al Shabaab insurgents out of the capital upon the completion of Ramadan.

"It's a tug of war," Bashir Goth, an influential Somali blogger and the editor of Awdal News, told The Media Line. "Sometimes they take an area, then the government takes it back. It's extremely unstable."

As a jihadist movement, Al Shabaab members have cited links with Al-Qa’ida although most analysts believe the affiliation to be minimal. The group has several thousand fighters divided into regional units which are thought to operate somewhat independently of one another.

"Al Shabaab is far from a unified organization," EJ Hogendoorn, the Horn of Africa Project Director for the International Crises Group told The Media Line. "There are several Al Shabaab affiliated groups that control much of south-central Somalia, some of which have tried to take control of Mogadishu. But because of the assistance the transitional government is getting, Al Shabaab is not able to achieve this. So right now there's a stalemate: while there is fighting centered around specific neighborhoods, as far as we can tell there are no significant changes in the military balance."

Goth argued that while support for the transitional government had weakened the insurgents, they still posed a significant threat to the viability of the Somali government.

"Al Shabaab is a cohesive, well-organized movement and they are everywhere," Goth said. "These people are well funded and they could potentially take power. They even nearly killed the president of Somaliland."

The U.S. has launched selected air strikes against Al Shabaab leaders thought to have ties to Al-Qa’ida, but analysts say this has only increased their support among Somalis.

U.S. officials believe that dozens of Americans have entered Somalia to join Al Shabaab's ranks. At least three Americans have been killed fighting for Al Shabaab, including a Somali-American who killed himself in a suicide attack last year.

"They are recruiting youth not only from America but also from Europe," Goth said. "They want to send a message that we can recruit your people and we can harm you."

"This is a very dangerous development," he warned. "A suicide bomber can get anywhere, and these people could come back at any time and cause lots of damage."

Somali-Americans are recruited to join Al-Shabaab through secret meetings, personal phone calls and Internet campaigns specifically targeted at English speakers. As many as 20 young American men are believed to have been recruited from Minnesota, home to the largest population of Somali immigrants in the US.

"They are trying to recruit impressionable young Somali Americans who are generally unemployed dropouts," Goth said. "They are just giving them a kind of illusionary hope, saying 'you are not making it in America. Come back to your roots, to Islam, and go to paradise.'"

Hogendoorn argued that Al-Shabaab's success can, in part, be credited to its foreign recruitment and fundraising.

"Al Shabaab has a relatively sophisticated propaganda machine and receives a fair amount of funding from outside of Somalia," Hogendoorn said. "Most of this work is being conducted outside of Somalia by Al Shabaab sympathizers."

"Because of 20 years of war there's a huge Somali population living outside of Somalia," he said. "Those communities still maintain very close ties to their relatives in Somalia, so when a Somali movement tries to speak to the public, they speak both to Somalis in Somalia and to Somalis in the diaspora."

Somalia has not had a functioning government since the 1991 ousting of Mohamed Siad Barre. The ensuing years have seen a chaotic system of rival clans controlling various parts of the capital.

Al Shabaab began its insurgency in late 2006 with assassinations and suicide bombings against the transitional government and aid workers, particularly in Mogadishu.

The Western-backed Ethiopian military invaded the country in 2007, but many analysts believe this augmented Al Shabaab's insurgency campaign, and battles between Al Shabaab and Ethiopian forces caused roughly 400,000 people to flee the capital in August 2007.

The Ethiopians withdrew in January of this year after over 16 months of Al Shabaab attacks on its forces.

African Union (AU) peacekeepers have also been in the country since 2007, but have made little impact with just over 3,000 troops from Uganda and Burundi. Eleven Burundian soldiers were killed by Al Shabaab in February of this year, the deadliest attack on AU peacekeepers since their deployment.

The new President of Somalia's battered government is Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a former schoolteacher and former official in the Islamic Courts, which controlled Mogadishu and parts of Somalia prior to the Ethiopian invasion. An Islamist supportive of sharia law himself, he seeks to integrate Al Shabaab fighters into the transitional government's forces.

There are over 2 million internally displaced people in Somalia, and UN officials says there are over 1.3 million Somalis in need of emergency food aid. Up to a fifth of the population is suffering from malnutrition.