Somalis deported from Kenya are greeted by Minister for Transport and Air Travel Said Jama Qorshel (blue shirt), State Minister for Foreign Affairs Buri Mohamed Hamza (shaking hands with deportee) and the director of Somali Immigration Department, General Abdullahi Gafow Mohamud (black shirt). It is estimated that some 500 Somalis have been deported, while a further 4,000 are detained in Kenya. Credit: Abdirahman Omar Abdi/IPS

By Muhyadin Ahmed Roble
NAIROBI, May 27 2014 (IPS)

Somalia’s State Minister for Interior and Federalism Affairs Mohamud Moalim Yahye has told IPS that the hasty repatriation and mass deportation of its citizens by Kenya could compromise recent, critical security improvements made by regional governments against the Islamic extremist group, Al-Shabaab.

“The unplanned and uncoordinated deportation of people, especially the youth, will create chaos and anarchy as there are no resources to support and create jobs for them,” Yahye told IPS by phone from Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital.

The Somali government has asked that Kenya suspend the current mass deportation of its citizens, which began early April, until the Tripartite agreement for repatriation of Somali refugees is implemented.

The agreement, which was signed last year by the two governments and the United Nations Refugees Agency, aims to send refugees back to Somalia over the next three years. However, the agreement only outlines the voluntary and organised repatriation of refugees to Somalia.

Yahye said that Somalia, where the unemployment rate for youth aged 14 to 29 is one of the highest in the world at 67 percent, did not have the capacity to receive and integrate large numbers of returning refugees and deportees.

As a result, security experts, government officials and politicians in Mogadishu and Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, have raised concerns that deportees and returnees could be vulnerable to recruitment by Al-Shabaab, which desperately needs new blood.

“These young men, if they join the militants, will be an asset that could help the group wreak havoc not only Somalia and Kenya, but the greater region of East Africa,” Zakariye Yusuf, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, told IPS.

Kenya is home to more than one million Somali refugees, half of whom are unregistered migrants, according to Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

Kenya’s Usalama Watch — which resulted in over 4,000 people, all most of all of them Somali refugees and migrants, being taken into custody — has resulted in the repatriation of about 500 people to Somalia.

Hundreds are awaiting deportation, according to the Somali Embassy in Kenya. Airline and travel agencies officials say a further 7,000 people — half of them youth — fled Nairobi to Mogadishu after the operation was launched.

Thousands of others are believed to have crossed the Kenyan border and returned to Somalia.

Because of their knowledge of the Swahili language and the culture of the region, Yusuf said these Somali youth could be assigned by Al-Shabaab to return to Kenya, and possibly other East Africa countries, to carry out terrorist activities.

“It will be easy for them to hide, infiltrate the society and run safe houses while coordinating operations than other members who haven’t lived in Kenya,” he added.

Al-Shabaab has been suffering from a lack of financial constrains after losing its foothold on Mogadishu and the port town of Kismayo. The group has also experienced a shortage of foot soldiers over the past three years. Hundreds of its fighters have either been killed, sneaked out of the country, or deserted over to the government, which is promised them amnesty, protection and a better future.

“These young men used to run small scale business or work as shop-sellers in Nairobi, but their life is being interrupted by the crackdown and the deportation,” Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdisamad, a Horn of Africa specialist at Kenyatta University in Kenya, told IPS.

“They are now hopeless back in their country and desperate for doing whatever could help them to make a living. That’s the type of recruits Al-Shabaab is looking for,” he said.

He added that the group, which claimed responsibility for September’s four-day terror siege on Kenya’s Westgate Shopping Mall that resulted in the death of about 67 people, was a dying horse.

“Sending or deporting people, especially young men back to Somalia, is simply giving a lifeline to Al-Shabaab, which has a history of forced recruitment of youth, at crucial moment,” said Abdisamad.

He explained that the deportees and returnees could join the militants either to earn a wage to support their families or for revenge because they feel humiliated and abused by Kenya.

He said the deportations created a situation where Al-Shabaab had an opportunity to recruit energetic and cheap foot soldiers.

“When you mishandle the issue of terrorism, it has a lot of repercussions and that’s what the militants wanted and waited for years for. As a result, nothing has improved in terms of security since the operation was launched,” Abdisamad noted.

Indeed, a senior Al-Shabaab commander Fuad Mohamed Khalaf said last week that his group would be shifting its war to neighbouring Kenya, and threatened to send teenage suicide bombers to Nairobi.

Khalaf urged Muslims in Kenya to fight against their government for the retaliation of their “Muslim brothers” killed in Kenya and Somalia.

Abdisamad pointed out that the operation, which has been marred by lack of clear counter-terrorism strategy,  abuses and harassment, has been counter-productive and serves as a perfect conduit for the Al-Qaeda-linked group’s recruitment.

11-year-old Hassan Abdullahi Duale works 12-hour shifts at a car-repair shop in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu. Credit:Alinoor Salad/IPS

By Muhyadin Ahmed Roble
NAIROBI/MOGADISHU, May 17 2014 (IPS)

Twelve-year-old Halima Mohamed Ali wakes up every morning at five am, but unlike her peers she does not go to school. Instead, she begins her duties as a nanny for five children, the oldest of whom is just two years younger than she is.

She starts off by making breakfast, then wakes the children and washes and dresses them in time for school or madrassa, institutions of religious instruction.

War and famine in Somalia have forced Halima, and thousands of others like herself, to abandon the dream of education and become workers instead. UNICEF statistics from 2011, the last time such data was collected, show that half of all children between the ages of five and 14 hailing from the country’s central and southern regions are employed.

In Puntland and Somaliland, which have been more stable than other parts of Somalia for the past two decades, more than a quarter of all children work for a living.

The grueling jobs for which they are hired – mostly manual and domestic labour – pay little but demand a lot.

Halima says she works from “sunrise to sunrise”, cooking, ironing, washing floors, bathing the children, and finally putting them to bed before calling it a day. “It is a very stressful job,” confessed the girl, who has never set foot in a classroom.

She’d love to shirk her duties and bury her nose in a book, but her 50-dollar monthly salary is a lifeline for her family of five, who have no other breadwinner.

Surrounded by her mother and young sisters on one of her rare half-days off, Ali told IPS, “If I miss even a single day of work, my family will go to bed hungry.”

It is a tremendous burden for a child, but compared to the hardships the Ali family has endured, sending young Halima off to work is not the end of the world.

Originally hailing from the Dinsor district in Somalia’s southern Bay region, located about 266 km from the capital Mogadishu, the family fled the deadly famine in 2011, narrowly missing becoming statistics along with the nearly quarter of a million pastoralists who starved to death as a fierce drought consumed the countryside and resulted in hundreds of thousands of livestock deaths.

When they finally reached Mogadishu, the family took shelter in a makeshift camp called Badbaado, which means ‘salvation’ in Somali, along with 50,000 others refugees.

At first, the camp’s occupants received food rations, shelter and medical assistance, Ali said, but when the United Nations declared an end to the famine in February 2012, the flow of aid slowed to a trickle. Few of the displaced have been able to find work – lacking formal education and possessing no skills beyond the ability to farm or rear livestock, they have turned to the only option open to them: sending the children out to make a living however they can.

Though Halima is exhausted at the end of her 17-hour workday, she is glad of the chance to provide for her family.

Her story echoes those of countless others in the East African nation, according to Mohamed Abdi, programme manager of Somali Peace Line, an organisation that promotes and protects the rights of children.

“Hundreds of girls are brought to Mogadishu from rural areas where there is [extreme] poverty and famine conditions … to work as domestic servants in middle-class homes. They work long hours for food, lodging and low wages, which they send back to their families,” Abdi told IPS over the phone from the capital.

“Lucky ones” like Ali get paid on a regular basis, Abdi said; many others have their meagre salaries withheld for months, are cut off from their families, abused and treated like slaves.

He strongly believes that the on-going violence across Somalia, caused by the outbreak of civil war in 1991, will ensure a steady stream of child labourers, as desperate families lose jobs, and hope.

“When we try to convince parents not to send their children to work, they ask us for alternative sources of income, which we cannot provide,” he admitted.

Citing a human development report released in 2012 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Abdi said more than 70 percent of the population of 10.2 million are classified as “low-income”, with 73 percent of all Somalis living on less than two dollars a day.

The unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world, with 54 percent of all Somalis between the ages of 15 and 64 out of work.

Little Hands, Low Wages

In addition to being vulnerable to informal labour conditions such as long hours, children like 11-year-old Hassan Abdullahi Duale also receive lower wages than their adult counterparts, even when they perform all the same functions.

When his father was killed in a suicide bomb blast in Mogadishu two years ago, Duale – the only boy in the family – left school and took a job in a car-repair centre where he works 12-hour days to support his mother and two young sisters.

Dressed in his ‘uniform’ of an oil-soaked Arsenal T-shirt and matching shorts, Duale tells IPS that his uncle got him this job so his family would be able to eat. Though he is tempted to quit and go back to school, he feels responsible for his family.

With the idea of formal education a distant memory, his only hope is to make a career as a mechanic. For now, however, he is paid far less than his co-workers, and is sometimes even forced to do their jobs without earning a single extra coin for his efforts.

“On a good day, when there are lots of cars to fix, I earn 50 Somali shillings (about 2.5 dollars) a day. On bad days, I am just given my lunch and sent home with nothing,” said Duale, sweat dripping down his face.

“The adults earn about 150 shillings (roughly 7.5 dollars) each day, and sometimes they take my earnings by force. There’s nothing I can do and no-one to complain to, so I just wait for the next working day,” he added.

The director-general of Somalia’s ministry of human development and public services, Aweys Sheikh Haddad, said his country’s constitution bans child labour, adding that the government recently ratified an International Labour Organization (ILO) convention forbidding the worst forms of child labour.

But challenges in law enforcement mean these commitments on paper have not amounted to much in practice. Various studies and reports have found children as young as five years old engaged in virtually every industry, from construction to agriculture.

In addition to their exploitation for military purposes – operating checkpoints, becoming suicide bombers or taking up arms, for instance – children all across southern Somalia can also be seen working on the streets, washing cars, shining shoes and selling khat, a plant that contains an amphetamine-like stimulant.

“The government believes that making education more accessible to the children can help to eliminate child labour and we are in the process of [implementing] such programmes aimed to bring more children back to school,” Haddad told IPS.

“We have launched the ‘Go-2-School’ initiative, which aims to provide one million children with free education,” he added. However, these plans have yet to bear fruit: according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), only 710,860 youth out of 1.7 million primary school-aged children are enrolled in any kind of education.

Without a drastic interruption of the vicious cycles that perpetuate child labour, the future looks bleak for Somalia’s youth.

Former Al-Shabaab combatants who handed themselves over to the Somali government. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

By Muhyadin Ahmed Roble
NAIROBI, Oct 22 2013 (IPS)

For years the Islamist extremist group Al-Shabaab was seen as the most cohesive, united and powerful force in the failed state of Somalia. But it is now disintegrating like a house of cards because of internal divisions and power struggles within its leadership, according to Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdisamad, a history and political science professor at Kenya’s Kenyatta University.

“They [the militants] are transforming into warring mini-groups, hunting each other due to their deteriorating ideological differences, and of course [the group is] on the brink of civil war within itself,” Abdisamad told IPS in Nairobi.

Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for September’s four-day terror siege on Kenya’s Westgate Shopping Mall that resulted in the death of more than 70 people, and for the Oct. 13 bombing in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Abba, which killed two Somali nationals who were believed to be suspects.

But the militant group, which formally linked with Al-Qaeda in 2012, has been in a leadership and strategy dispute that has divided it into two factions – global jihadists and local nationalists.

Abdisamad sees the militants’ internal divisions as a golden opportunity for the Somali government to bring less extremist and nationalist-minded elements on board.

“Initially, Al-Shabaab came together by default, not by design,” he said, adding that if the Somali government did not capitalise on the rift and reach out to the nationalist faction, the global jihadists would win and become stronger.

“And then, the future of Somalia will be uncertain, the stability of the region will be in question and no doubt the stability of the whole world will be in question too,” Abdisamad said.

He explained that the moment that turned the group’s internal war into an open and public battle was when Al-Shabaab’s two co-founders and top leaders, Ibrahim Haji and Moalim Burhan, were killed by members of the group in June.

Jama, who was better known by his moniker “Al-Afghani” due to his Al-Qaeda training in Afghanistan, had a five million dollar U.S. bounty on his head.

But Al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Abdiaziz Abu Musab denied a split within the group and had said that Jama and Burhan were intentionally killed in a shoot-out when they rejected an arrest warrant from a Sharia court.

Two foreign jihadists, the American-born Omar Hammami known as Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, who was on the FBI’s most wanted list with a five million dollar reward for his capture, and Osama al-Britani, a British citizen of Pakistani descent, were also killed by Al-Shabaab last month.

Al-Amriki was perhaps the most well-known Al-Shabaab propagandist because of his English jihadi rap videos. In 2012 he was the first member of the group to reveal its split through a short online video clip in which he said his life was in danger.

He was on the run and survived several assassination attempts by the Amniyat unit, an intelligence division of Al-Shabaab led by Ahmed Abdi Godane, who is also known as Sheikh Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr, and is the group’s supreme leader. Al-Amriki was eventually killed in September.

Abdisamad explained that Godane is a supporter of global jihad who believes that Somalia belongs to all Muslims across the world. “[Godane’s] global jihadist faction has an agenda beyond Somalia and wants to spread Islam from China to Chile, from Cape Town to Canada,” Abdisamad said.

Another member of the group who was aligned to the nationalist-minded faction to which Jama belonged, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, escaped from Al-Shabaab’s largest remaining base in Barawe, which is located some 180 km south of Mogadishu.

He surrendered to the Somali government following the murder of Jama and Burhan. According to Abdisamad, Aweys and his faction are considered to be less extremist as their intention is to establish an Islamic state within Somalia borders and not bother neighbouring countries.

“The religious nationalism faction is against globalising the conflict in Somalia, indiscriminate assassinations and the killing of clerics, scholars and everyone who seem to have not favoured the militants. For years they campaigned to replace Godane, which they failed [to do],” Abdisamad said.

The group’s internal division is believed to have contributed to their loss of strategic towns in southern and central Somalia, including part of the capital, Mogadishu.

The Bakara market in the capital city was their main source of funding as the group used to generate millions of dollars from there through taxation and by extortions from telecommunication companies and the business community at large. Al-Shabaab was ousted from Mogadishu in 2011 by Somali forces and African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) troops.

Exactly a year later, the group lost its last remaining and greatest revenue source – the stronghold of Kismayo, a port city in southern Somalia.

According to a United Nations report, Al-Shabaab used to generate between 35 to 50 million dollars annually from the southern seaports of Kismayo and Marko. Both ports are now under the control of Somali forces and AMISOM troops.

“Such a loss of economic sources and internal divisions have led hundreds of Al-Shabaab fighters to defect to the government,” Somali journalist, Mohamed Abdi, told IPS. The group, he said, failed to keep paying their fighters regularly “as they used to do” before the financial constraints emerged.

Abdi said that the financial constraints and the open rift within the group’s leadership have largely demolished the morale, loyalty and capability of the group’s foot soldiers. It has lead to hundreds of them deserting to the government or fleeing the organisation and going into hiding in Somalia or in neighbouring countries.

But Abdisamad Moalim Mohamud, Somalia’s former minister for the interior and national security and a current member of parliament, told IPS that the group remains a threat not only to Somalia, but also to regional and global security.

“They have lost more of their foot soldiers and can’t counter Somali and AMISOM forces directly any more. But they are more capable of conducting effective guerrilla-style warfare such as suicide attacks and storming places like Westgate Mall in Nairobi and the U.N. compound in Mogadishu,” Mohamud said by phone from Mogadishu.

He said that regional intelligence sharing and developing joint monitoring platforms and common anti-terror strategies within regional governments could be used to prevent such a threat. But he disagreed that their internal division had something to do with nationalism.

“Their rift has a lot to do with the leadership change of Al-Qaeda than local politics and it is more about pursuing hegemony over the command and control of the group,” Mohamud said.

Somali Presdient Hassan Sheikh Mohamud speaking to residents of the central Somalia town of Jowhar, Middle Shabelle province on Sept. 9, 2013. Somali’s are disillusioned by the continued terrorists attacks and lack of service delivery here. Credit: Ahmed Osman/IPS

By Muhyadin Ahmed Roble and Yusuf Ahmed
MOGADISHU/NAIROBI, Sep 12 2013 (IPS)

After his first year as president of the world’s most dangerous and failed state, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is still grappling with limited financial resources, corruption, a lack of service delivery, and the ongoing assassinations of government officials, including attempts on his own life.

The Somali president, who on Tuesday Sep. 10 celebrates 365 days of being voted into office by legislators, has had a difficult first year of his four-year term.

Analysts say that not only has Mohamud had to contend with the Islamist extremist group Al-Shabaab, which has waged a number of recent terrorist attacks on the capital Mogadishu despite being ousted from key cities across this Horn of African nation, and an increasing number breakaway states, he also faces a growing and deep disillusionment among Somalis.

Abdi Aynte, the founder and executive director of the Heritage Institute for Policy Studies (HIPS), the country’s first think tank, said that Mohamud’s Six Pillar Policy to bring security, stability, justice, economic recovery, and service delivery to Somalia was ambitious.

“The Six Pillar Policy has been ambitious, but public service delivery is practically non-existent,” Aynte told IPS in Nairobi.

“It’s therefore no surprise that no noticeable progress has been made towards achieving any of it.”

However, he added: “The government seems to be taking important steps to defuse tensions, address shortcomings and widen consultations with the public. The ‘Vision 2016’ conference was a positive step.”

Somalis have lived through almost 20 years of war, poverty and displacement following the ouster of dictator and former president Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. The country had no central government until 2000, after which a series of interim governments were elected.

There are also few essential services or healthcare facilities in the country, with most being provided by NGOs. For over 20 years Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, was one of the few providers of essential healthcare in Somalia. But in August it pulled out of the country after the murder and harassment of their staff made it increasingly impossible for the organisation to operate.

But Mohamud’s aides are quick to defend the former university professor and civil society activist, who survived an assassination attempt while travelling to the southern Somali town of Merca on Sep. 3. Presidential spokesman Abdirahman Omar Osman told IPS in Mogadishu that while the country had critical financial constraints, progress had been made in a number of areas.

“The government, for the first time, engages with communities on key decision-making process. We hold national reconciliation conferences on judicial reform on political vision, on education and how to tackle religious extremisim.”

He said that the government’s record speaks for itself.

“We have maintained security in all territories capture from Al-Shabaab, we are stabilising all regions in Somalia that we ousted Al-Shabaab [from].

“We pay our soldiers regularly, we pay our MPs and civil servants regularly. We have implemented public financial management that is sound. The parliament functions properly and ratified many key legislations,” Osman said.

He said that for the first time in Somalia the government “was able to reach most regions and districts [and] this was a historic achievement.” He added that Mohamud was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the world’s 100 key influential leaders and that the government had gained the recognition of its international partners including the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan, among others.

He added that “the government doesn’t have enough money to do everything.”

“The government’s monthly revenue is roughly three million dollars from [income from] Mogadishu’s seaport and the airport, and yet the budget we need to execute our daily activities is at least 20 million dollars each month,” he said.

However, Mogadishu’s seaport deputy director Abdiqani Osman Kabareto told local Radio Ergo in August that the seaport generates between four and five million dollars a month. However, Mogadishu’s Airport officials were not available to comment on their monthly revenue.

“Imagine a government with such limitations of budget trying to rebuild and create its institutions from scratch. That is where the problem lies. It’s financial shortage,” Osman said.

Mohamed Ali, a university graduate of Simad University, which Mohamud helped found, told IPS that although he supported Mohamud’s election, he feels that there is not much to celebrate a year later.

“I felt he was one of us and the only one who understood our needs, our suffering, our importance more than any,” said Ali.

Ali, who graduated three years ago with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, is still struggling to find a job, and he has given up hope that the president will deliver on his promises of job creation.

The United Nations Development Programme estimates that 67 percent of the youth in Somalia are unemployed. More than half of Somalia’s 10.7 million people are under the age of 30.

“He became like any other politician who delivers nothing of what they promised after getting into office. I saw him as the candidate of hope and change, but the only thing that has changed so far is the name of the government from the Transitional Federal Government to the Federal Government of Somalia.”

In August 2012, the Federal Government of Somalia succeeded the interim Transitional Federal Government.

Professor of economics and vice president of the Horn of Africa University in Mogadishu, Yahye Sheik Amir, said limited financial resources were not Mohamud’s only problem. He said that the endemic corruption within governmental institutions undermined the possibility of any economic recovery and development here.

“The government also lacks strategies that can help generate money beyond the airport and seaport in Mogadishu,” Amir told IPS.

“The government could collect millions of dollars through taxation and business licence and registration fees for companies working in the country, only if it expands its administration beyond the capital and also develops transparent and accountable institutions for managing the revenue,” he noted.

Aynte urged the government to declare war on corrupt syndicates and to exercise the utmost transparency. He said that improved security was needed in order to generate additional revenue.

The government recently began collecting taxes in some areas of the capital city but a number of its tax collectors have been attacked. At least five taxmen have been killed this year, while more than 10 were gunned down last year, according to sources in Mogadishu’s local administration.

Osman promised that a year from now, Al-Shabaab will be defeated and security and stability will return to the country, and that hopefully the government will be capable of providing public services.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Osman said, adding that the Somali government was happy with its progress to date.

HIPS’s Aynte was hopeful about the year ahead. “I’m optimistic that by [the end of next year] there will be enough impetus to move the country to the right direction, even if it is slow.”

* The story that originally moved on Sep. 10, incorrectly quoted Abdi Aynte and Abdirahman Omar Osman as saying that Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud failed to make progress in his first year in power. This story contains further comment from Osman about the government’s successes in its first year.

As the Somali government announced it would set up a coastguard to combat piracy in this Horn of African nation, insecurity is emerging as the biggest challenge that the government faces – and it is only getting worse.

Osman Aweis Dahir, director of the local Dr. Ismail Jimale Human Rights Organisation, said that the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab has renewed its campaign to bring instability to the country’s capital Mogadishu.

“The little stability that the city had experienced since the Al-Shabaab withdrawal appears to have been broken,” Dahir told IPS from Mogadishu. The Islamist extremist group was forced out of its bases in Mogadishu on Aug. 6, 2011 by Somali and African Union peace-keeping forces. Until the withdrawal, the government only controlled half of the city.

But in recent weeks there has been a rise in the number of ambushes, assassinations and suicide bombs in Somalia’s capital.“The city is like an open shop in a market which its owner has left [unattended].” -- Jama Ahmed Siad, local security expert

“The city has experienced its deadliest attacks in recent times during the past two weeks,” said Dahir. More than 60 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in several incidents across Mogadishu. This is a setback to the rising hopes of a return to relative security.”

On Tuesday, Jul. 30, an officer from Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) was assassinated by Al-Shabaab. His name was added to the growing list of government officials killed over the last three weeks. Included on that list is female deputy commissioner of Mogadishu’s Yaqshid district, Rahma Dahir Siad, who was killed outside her home on Jul. 17.

Even foreign diplomats are not safe in the city. On Jul. 27, Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for an attack on the Turkish embassy that killed three people.

It was the second that day. A few hours earlier a bomb planted inside a member of parliament’s vehicle exploded in the north of the city.

On Jul. 24, Sheikh Abdu Aziz Abu Musab, Al-Shabaab’s military spokesman, said that his group carried out over 100 attacks between Jul. 10 and 24. Half of these, he said, occurred in Mogadishu.

“If anything, the sharp rise in such coordinated attacks is a clear testament to the strength of the Mujahidin and their operational capacity,” he told a pro-Islamist radio station in Somalia.

Somali Prime Minister Abdi Farah Shirdoon acknowledged his disappointment at the government’s weak handling of the security situation in the country. “We are very concerned [about] the security matter and it was not handled the way we wanted,” Shirdoon told reporters in Mogadishu on Jul. 18. He promised to improve the city’s security.

But Jama Ahmed Siad, a security expert based in Mogadishu, said the government was negligent and lacked a clear strategy to counter the Islamist extremist group’s switch to guerrilla-style warfare.

“Security is the key to all problems in Somalia and when you solve it, you have solved half the problem,” Siad told IPS, adding that the government is yet to understand that.

“For instance, the NISA agents have reduced their presence on the roads entering Mogadishu for the past three months. They used to inspect the vehicles and people entering the city at these checkpoints, where they previously captured members of Al-Shabaab trying to infiltrate the city,” Siad added.

A senior officer at NISA told IPS that the agency had handed the control of these checkpoints to the Somali police and military “but there is a plan to deploy NISA’s agents back there very soon.”

Mohamed Elmi, a civil society activist in Mogadishu, said the government’s main challenge was how to combat the suicide car bombings. He told IPS that government forces did not have the advanced weaponry, technology and training for this.

President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud told journalists on Monday, Jul. 29: “The security forces are at war…but it is not easy to find a suicide car moving around in a city of two million.”

The presidential spokesman, Abdirahman Omar Osman, and the prime minister’s spokesperson, Ridwan Haji Abdiweli, refused to comment to IPS on the security situation in the city.

But one government official told IPS that the government had, on the day of the Turkish embassy bombing, deployed a 1,000-strong counter-terrorism force on the streets in Mogadishu. “The elite force with unique uniforms armed with advanced weapons and their vehicles painted in a distinctive colour are assigned to cleaning up the city of Al-Shabaab members,” said the officer who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorised to speak to the media.

Siad said such a force was unlikely to counter the Islamists’ increasing terror attacks. “There is no single Islamist base in the city, but several secret bases that they use. Therefore, such deployment is unhelpful,” he said.

He said the government needed to concentrate efforts on gathering intelligence relating to these secret Al-Shabaab bases and the organisation’s leaders in the city.

Dahir said the government’s weak handling of the country’s internal security casts doubt on its ability to deliver its Six Pillar Policy – a policy framework that aims to secure progress in the areas of security, stability, justice, economic recovery, peace-building, and service delivery.

In a policy brief released in April, the Heritage Institute for Policy Studies (HIPS), the country’s first think tank, praised the government’s foreign policy and diplomatic successes.

Somalia has been gaining more visibility in the international arena, with Mohamud paying high-level visits to Washington, London, Ankara, Brussels, Cairo and several other countries to build his government’s image.

“However, there are disturbing signs of an imbalance between foreign policy priorities and domestic achievements,” the HIPS report said.

And until the issue of domestic security is resolved, Mogadishu’s occupants will remain vulnerable.

“The city is like an open shop that its owner has left,” Siad said.

Former Al-Shabaab combatants who handed themselves over to the Somali government. Defections by Al-Shabaab members were rising dramatically, with many more expected in the coming months. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

By Muhyadin Ahmed Roble and Yusuf Ahmed
MOGADISHU/NAIROBI, May 8 2013 (IPS)

At 18, Farah Osman should not be a battle-hardened soldier. He should not have spent the last seven years fighting for the Somali Islamist extremist group Al-Shabaab, or have been trained by foreign jihadists in handling and repairing weapons and improving his shooting skills.

But he has. And now he is also a deserter. The tall, slim teenager is one of about 800 former Al-Shabaab fighters staying at Mogadishu’s Sarendi Rehabilitation Centre. He hopes he will soon be integrated back into society and into the Somali Armed Forces.

Osman cannot recall the exact month he was recruited as a fighter by the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab, but it was near the end of 2006, the year when United States-backed Ethiopian troops invaded Somalia to prop up the Somali Transitional Federal Government.

He was walking home from school on a steaming hot day when his former teacher from a local dugsi or religious school stopped him and took him to an Al-Shabaab base.

Osman sat panicked and alone under a tree in the base for a while, then the teacher returned with a group of men and bottles of mineral water and dates which they distributed to the young boys. Preachers then spoke for hours about the holy war, animosity with Ethiopia, and the importance of defending the country.

It was the year he turned 11.

“Heaven, money and prestige were convincing incentives. Their promises were irresistible,” says Osman.

He says everyone seemed ready to sacrifice their lives to defend their religion and their country.

His trainers were all Somalis, including Adan Hashi Farah “Eyrow”, a war veteran who founded Al-Shabaab, the armed wing of the Union of Islamic Courts. Farah was killed by a U.S. airstrike on his house in the town of Dhuusomareeb in central Somalia in May 2008.

“They offer a mobile phone and a monthly salary of 50 dollars,” Osman says. But he adds that this was not the only thing that pushed him to join the organisation. “I wanted to seem powerful and to be a respected man, and people (at that time) respected a man with a gun.”

For five years, Osman moved through the war-scarred buildings in Mogadishu, around the forests near the Kenya-Somalia borders and in southern Somalia on his mission to kill Somali and Ethiopian forces and African peacekeepers in the hope of going to heaven after death.

Then in October 2011, Al-Shabaab carried out a suicide attack on the education ministry in Mogadishu. More than 70 people were killed, most of them students checking their scholarship status.

“This is when I realised that Al-Shabaab was no longer fighting for religious or jihad reasons,” Osman tells IPS in a restaurant close to Villa Somalia, the country’s White House. “That is not what jihad is meant to represent.”

Osman is not the first or last Al-Shabaab fighter to desert the organisation. Hundreds of fighters across southern Somalia have turned in their guns and surrendered since 2010, when the government offered them amnesty, protection and a better future.

With Al-Shabaab under financial strain because of multiple frontlines and the loss of strategic towns in the country, many more fighters are expected to turn themselves in to the government, which has offered former fighters accommodation and job opportunities.

On one single day in September 2012, in the town of Jowhar, some 80 km from Mogadishu, 250 Al-Shabaab fighters became the largest number to surrender in a single day to Somali forces and the African Union Mission in Somalia.

Mogadishu intelligence chief Khalif Ahmed Ereg told reporters at a press conference in February that defections by Al-Shabaab members were rising dramatically, with many more expected in the coming months. However, the country’s National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) first investigates defectors before allowing them to join rehabilitation programmes.

Critics have raised concerns about the vetting process for defectors, claiming that many of them still have close ties to the extremist organisation.

Ibrahim Sheikh Hassan, an analyst and former professor of political science at Mogadishu’s pre-war Strategy College, tells IPS that NISA’s screening process is weak and insufficient and that Al-Shabaab are taking advantage to carry out a “planned infiltration” of the government’s security forces.

“They offer some accurate information to make their ‘sham’ defections appear genuine while planning destruction operations within the government,” Hassan adds.

It is a claim that NISA denies, but many of the recent killings, including a bomb blast and suicide attacks in the capital, have been blamed on sham defectors.

In January, an Al-Shabaab member who claimed to have defected from the group tried to kill the prime minister in a suicide bombing at the presidential palace. One government soldier was killed and several others were wounded.

“The agency should come up with another strategy of using the defectors as an asset without officially incorporating them into the agency. Their long-term effect should be a matter of concern.”

The Sarendi Rehabilitation Centre in Mogadishu, where Osman resides, is currently the only one of its kind in the country. But speaking to the national assembly in March, Prime Minister Abdi Farah Shirdoon said his government planned to open 10 centres to accommodate and rehabilitate Al-Shabaab deserters and soldiers captured in the war.

An official from the government’s rehabilitation programme, who asked to be referred to only as Ahmed, told IPS that there were currently another 800 Al-Shabaab defectors in southern and central regions of Somalia.

Ahmed told IPS the interior ministry was planning to open other rehabilitation centres in south and central Somalia – in Kismayo, Balad Weyne, Baido, Garbaharey, Jowhar, Marka and Guriceel – to accommodate the defectors.

The Sarendi Centre, which opened in March 2012, is run by Somalia’s interior and national security ministry and financially supported by Norway’s foreign ministry. It provides skills training, including football, driving and fishing lessons, and also teaches technical skills.

“Everyone is taught what he has an interest in,” says Osman.

But his interests remain centred on war. He wants to finish his mission of killing the “bad guys” – but as a soldier wearing a government uniform.