Analysts are warning  that  Somalia could soon become the Afghanistan of East Africa. With increasing numbers of Taliban fighters entering the country, bringing with them tactics such as suicide bombings that hadn’t been seen before in Somalia, the security situation is worsening rapidly.

“One has to regretfully conclude this”, says Dutch Horn of Africa expert Jan Abbink. In the capital Mogadishu,  Islamist insurgent groups are intensifying their attacks on the weakened UN-backed transitional government, with increasing support by foreign combatants known as Al-Muhajiroun (the emigrants).

Volunteers

Members of the Taliban are said to be pouring into the region from Afghanistan and Pakistan where they are no longer welcome, along with volunteers from the Middle East.

“There are even Ugandans, converted Europeans and Americans there. The foreign combatants have their own chain of command and are allied to the main Somali Al- Shabab militant group and they are gaining in influence,” says Jan Abbink, a researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden.  He estimates that there are “several dozen” Al-Muhajiroun on the ground.

Al-Shabab has admitted having a close relationship with Al-Quaeda.  The  foreign combatants or Jihadis coming to fight a holy war see Somalia as their new front,  similar to the one they formed in Asia. They  are bringing in money, arms, contacts, and training camps for new tactics such as suicide bombings that were once unheard of in Somalia. 

Internal Divisions

However, because of internal divisions, the insurgent groups have been unable to take advantage of  the increasing external support and the weakness of the transitional government to gain the upper hand in Mogadishu,  explains Mahad Mussa, the coordinator of Nedsom,  a Somali Diaspora foundation in the Netherlands.

The insurgency is deeply divided among clans that control certain neighbourhoods in the capital. What does unite them now is their desire to overthrow to the UN backed government, Mahad says.

According to Jan Abbink,  they are also strongly united in Islam and their desire to establish a theocratic regime in the country, which he believes even supersede inter-clan rivalries.

There is an emerging Islamic agenda in Somalia that was not there before, and we should not underestimate that. They will not immediately fall apart once they’re in power. That’s an easy conclusion by people who don’t understand the depth of the transformation in Somalia.

Mr. Mahad disagrees. If the Islamic insurgents manage to conquer the capital, he predicts that “the clan factor” will prevail as they try to extend their control to the rest of the country.

 “And then we will get what we had for the last 18 years:  many factions within the country and  more violence as each group tries to take over another group.”

The unrest already felt in Somalia’s neighbours in the Horn of Africa will then increase, and countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia, which withdrew its troops from Somalia in January,  will be tempted to intervene. This will confirm the “Afghanistan scenario”  believes Jan Abbink:

“We will  have a major source of instability in East Africa which will affect the entire region and require all kinds of extra military and humanitarian support from the international community”.

Prompt action

Both Professor Abbink and Mahad Mussa feel that the worst can still be avoided if the international community acts promptly, preferably `within a month` for Mr. Mahad.

Despite calls from Western countries and the African Union (AU) to increase international  support for the federal government and to reinforce AMISOM, the AU contingent in the country, concrete measures have yet to be announced. The government has complained that it has only received part of 200 million US dollars pledged at a donor conference in Brussels in April.

Meanwhile, civilians continue to bear the brunt of the fighting: almost 160,000 people have fled the capital in the past 2 weeks, according to the UN refugee organisation UNHCR.

Listen to the interview with Professor Jan Abbink of the African Studies Centre in Leiden: