Mogadishu, the Somali capital, with a population of 4.5 million, is plagued by out-of-control violence that is going crescendo. Unlike what most people believe, violence is no longer the preserve of the usual suspects: Al-Shabab insurgents. In fact, extremists compete with youth gangs and government forces.
Day and night there are assassinations, suicide bombings, police violence, mortar attacks as well as rapes, kidnappings and stabbings. If Al-Shabab remains the main threat to the security of Somalia’s most populous city, it is now overtaken, at least in Mogadishu, by rogue elements within government forces.
Violence at Every Street
Mogadishu has recently experienced the raise of youth gangs, locally called “Ciyaal Weero”. This gang of criminals emerged at the same time as the current president, Hassan Sheikh Mahamood, unleashed political violence during his bid to overthrow the then President, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo.
According to Somali Public Agenda (SPA), a Mogadishu-based think tank, Ciyaal Weero increasingly use firearms in their robberies. In their report on the matter, it is stated that some underpaid and poorly supervised police or military want to make ends meet and lease their guns or even join the gang at night.
Moreover, reckless government forces, protected by lax laws and a dysfunctional justice system, fire on anyone that comes near their convoy going through Mogadishu. A week ago, a rickshaw driver and his passenger, later revealed to be his sister, were shot dead this way in the Soobe Intersection in broad daylight.
The next day, a police officer shot another rickshaw driver who refused to be extorted. This sparked a wave of protests by rickshaw drivers angered by persistent police violence preventing them from earning a living. Violence that Prime Minister Hamze Barre has attributed to khat, a highly addictive drug for which the president and inner circle control exclusive import rights.
The threat to take up arms to protect themselves from the police forced PM Hamze to order the arrest of the rogue policemen responsible for the recent killings and to promise to crack down on the pervasive indiscipline he says has been caused by khat addiction.
Worst, the frequent skirmishes in the city of heavily armed security forces belonging to different corps. For example, a few days ago a clash at the Sinay Intersection pitted NISA agents and the police on one side against a district governor’s security detail, killing 10 people, most of them bystanders and street vendors.
According to a local reporter from Gaylan Media, Farah Abdulkadir, in that same week the police has killed as much as Al-Shabab prompting an MP close to the government to states that “it makes sense to be killed by government forces rather than terrorists or clan militias”.
As if not to improve the situation, the President authorized soldiers to join with their weapons and military equipment their clan militias’ effort to drive Al-Shabab from their lands. Some of these militias are once again flexing their muscle against the government. Last week, for example, a heavily armed Murursade clan militia blocked traffic in Mogadishu in a show of force, instead angering residents.
Hassan Sheikh’s Harmful Choices
The city who once was called “the most dangerous city in the world” following the civil war has enjoyed a newfound peace and stability up until 2022. Indeed, starting in 2017, President Farmajo improved the effectiveness of the security forces by restructuring the way forces are recruited, paid and deployed and by putting in place a system for managing military assets, including weapons tracking.
Current president, Hassan Sheikh inherited sound governance, a professional army and a coherent security system but already faces challenges at the start of his 4-year term. Most of them are entirely his own as he embarked to reverse any progress towards national stability made by his predecessor whose authority he has undermined over the past two years during the long delayed elections.
The president went so far as to engage the country in more uncertainty by giving free rein to nepotism, cronyism, corruption and even placed thousands of Somali soldiers in the service of the United Arab Emirates rather than his own nation.
What is worse is that the president, who once declared that Somalia doesn’t need a strong army, while asking for foreign troops, seems content with current frequent desertions of demoralized soldiers. The recent mayhem in Mogadishu by disgruntled soldiers who recently returned from Eritrea shows how mismanagement of our forces is adding to the already widespread insecurity.
Moreover, as soon as the new president was put in power, the first action he did was to appoint Mahad Salad, a firebrand politician from his clan known to have ties to the Al-Shabab terror group, as the National Intelligence Security Agency (NISA) director.
Since then, Mahad Salad, as the new spymaster, laid off senior security officers, disbanded undercover agents embedded in the society to disrupt Al-Shabab terror plans and organized crime activities, and arrested others suspected of being close to the previous director, Fahad Yasin.
Additionally, an unusually high number of security personnel died in ambushes later blamed on Al-Shabab. The most prominent of these assassinations was that of Farhan Qarole, the charismatic young police chief of Mogadishu, who was ambushed on his way to meet Mahad Salad.
The Failed Leadership of President Hassan Sheikh
Mahad Salad, the man Hassan Sheikh gave free reign on security matters, has now taken control of Mogadishu policing. This was followed by a series of Al-Shabab attacks like the Villa Rose hotel siege and the Soobe massacre among others.
At the same time, the national police commissioner, General Abdi Hassan Hijar, a veteran army officer, was smeared, sidelined and forced to report to Salad. Hijar, uncomfortable working with Salad who had no prior experience in the security sector, was later sacked by President Hassan Sheikh in January.
Now, the capital security is controlled by inexperienced individuals and people who have ties to Al-Shabab. No wonder reports indicate that there were more assassinations in the first six months of Hassan Sheikh’s term than in the previous five years.
President Hassan Sheikh was nicknamed a few months ago the “mayor of Mogadishu” because it is the only Somali city where he can make laws that could be applied. Now, with his failure to overcome the prevailing insecurity in his city, and around his palace, he has found solace in spending more time traveling the world.
Indeed, the presidential palace, Villa Somalia, where the president resides and has his offices, has been been attacked twice recently. The most serious attack compelled him to spend the night in Halane, a fortified “green zone” where foreign missions are located.
The government’s mismanagement of Mogadishu’s security has allowed Al-Shabab to regain ground lost in the regions during the recent Ma’awisley offensive. Lacking ideas and out of greed, Hassan Sheikh had declared war on Al-Shabab to get funding from international donors – in a country already at war with Al-Shabab since the CIA-funded Ethiopian invasion in 2007.
Surprisingly, hidden within the city, Al-Shabab is fighting on another front: the hearts and minds of the people of Mogadishu. It has declared its own war on street gangs to fill the void left by the government. Their modus operandi is the summary execution of anyone caught trafficking alcohol, khat and other drugs from Kenya, Ethiopia and India.
Last Sunday, a place used to consume khat was bombed, killing 5 attendants and injuring many others. No one claimed responsibility for the attack but police blamed Al-Shabab. For residents, however, tired of the Ciyaal Weero, residents turn to Al-Shabab is better at cleaning up their neighborhoods.
The Challenges Ahead
While powerful men within the federal administration have the monopoly on the khat import, disaffected sea and land borders give crime lords free hand to inundate the black market with unregulated products like arms, hard drugs and alcohol. Somalia has the longest unguarded coastline in Africa and already porous land borders have recently been stripped bare by a government decision.
Indeed, the government has withdrawn hundreds of elite soldiers, initially sent to fight cross-border crimes and Al-Shabab, from the Gedo, which borders Kenya and Ethiopia, to be redeployed to Hirshabelle to fight… Al-Shabab. At the same time began the assassinations of senior officials in the region who were in disagreement with the president of Jubaland or Mahad Salad.
Criminals aside, already unruly state security agents, some of whom now have carte blanche to kill at will, and corrupt leaders with no empathy, are straining the patience of the population. Weapons are already selling like hot cakes at the Bakara market and a population that arms itself risks prolonging the country’s instability.
As Somalia is awash with foreign troops – around 22,000 African troops, thousands of security contractors and now thousands more troops from neighboring countries pouring in – whose avowed purpose is to fight Al-Shabab, donor countries expect the government to prioritize this particular security threat, even if it means neglecting other forms of security threats.
In a nutshell, the odds of defeating Al-Shabab on the battlefield may be good but the ragtag militia lives off Somalia’s political debauchery and its leaders’ addiction to everything foreign, let alone the rampant corruption and mismanagement in the security sector.
Against this backdrop, locals wonder what good the vast amount of weapons the Americans donated to the government last week would be used for, other than supplying indirectly Al-Shabab, criminal gangs and clan militias, to perpetuate instability in Somalia and to justify the UN embargo that the United States has supported for three decades.
