Somalia’s political stand-off may erupt into a region-wide conflict involving al-Qaeda unless its fragile government can bring Islamists into its ranks, a think-tank said on Friday.
Foreign states, particularly Ethiopia and Eritrea, must stop supporting the rival factions or risk inflaming the situation, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said in a report.
”Unless the crisis is contained, it threatens to draw in a widening array of state actors, foreign jihadi extremists and al-Qaeda,” said the report, entitled Can the Somali Crisis Be Contained?.
The interim government of Ethiopian-backed President Abdullahi Yusuf has had its brittle authority challenged by a group of militarily superior Islamists, whom United Nations monitors say have received Eritrean military support.
The Islamists seized Mogadishu and its environs in June after routing warlords who had ruled Somalia since the 1991 ousting of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
”The prospects for a peaceful resolution of the present crisis are poor,” ICG said.
The transitional federal government (TFG), due to name a streamlined Cabinet by Monday, must include the Islamists and other clan groups, namely the Hawiye that populate Mogadishu and who feel locked out of the administration, it said.
”If the [government] does not broaden its base, the strong groups now outside the government will almost certainly block its progress,” ICG said.
Western governments fear the Islamists, a coalition of sharia courts led by cleric Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, want to create a Taliban-style regime.
Aweys is on a UN list of those linked to al-Qaeda, but he denies any affiliation.
Government stronghold
Ethiopia has threatened to ”crush” the Islamists if they attack the government’s only stronghold, in Baidoa.
An opponent of radical Islam and Washington’s main counter-terrorism ally in the region, Ethiopia in the 1990s attacked militant Somali Islamists including Aweys.
”Preventing foreign jihadis from adopting Somalia as a base is one of the few things most international actors agree on,” the report said.
”Unfortunately, it is also one of the most likely outcomes of regional and international involvement in Somali affairs.”
Already, ICG said, Ethiopian support for Yusuf’s government — including what diplomats and security experts say are several thousand soldiers inside Somalia — has given the Islamists a rallying point against Ethiopia and Yusuf.
Threats by some hardliners to take the battle to Addis Ababa and likely Islamist links to Ethiopian rebels ”suggest that violence might well spread beyond Somalia’s borders”.
”If other regional states join Ethiopia in its military adventurism, they too risk becoming targets of the Islamic courts and its supporters abroad,” the report says.
That could culminate in attacks similar to the 1998 US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, the 2002 blast at an Israeli-owned Kenyan hotel and a failed rocket attack on an Israeli-chartered jet the same day in Kenya, ICG said. — Reuters