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A mass burial of victims killed during fighting in Mogadishu.

Somalia’s offshore and onshore struggles have come to international attention in recent weeks with the focus on pirates hijacking ships and Islamist forces fighting the Western-backed government.

David Axe is an independent correspondent contributing to From the Frontline and World Politics Review. He blogs at ”War is Boring” and writes about Islamist gains in Somalia and what Islamist leadership would mean for the country.

Good News, Bad News in Somali Islamists’ Return

Against the backdrop of starvation and warfare, there are signs that Somalia’s decline might soon turn around. At this point in Somalia’s tortured history, the country’s fortunes are tethered to its resurgent Islamist groups.

In early November, one of southern Somalia’s major ports fell to an advancing Islamist army. The U.N. had been using the “beach port” at Merka to deliver thousands of tons of food aid to refugee camps on the outskirts of Mogadishu. With its fall to the Islamists, there was concern that food shipments might be disrupted. But Pete Smerdon, a U.N. spokesman in Nairobi, Kenya, told World Politics Review that there is “no indication” the Islamists’ rise will have any effect at all on the aid effort.

That’s good news, for Islamists likely represent Somalia’s future. This year, two main Islamic groups have made steady gains in the country’s south, two years after they were driven from Mogadishu by a mixed army of Ethiopians, northern Somali militiamen and U.S. Special Forces.

In the aftermath of the Ethiopian invasion, the deposed Union of Islamic Courts and its hardline armed wing, Al Shabab (”The Youth”), launched a brutal insurgency that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and sapped the strength not only of the Ethiopians and the Ethiopians’ Somali allies, but also of a small African Union peacekeeping force clinging to life in Mogadishu.

Last year, Al Shabab adopted tactics pioneered by insurgents in Iraq and Lebanon, and announced its support for al-Qaida’s global terror campaign. But soon thereafter, rifts appeared in Al Shabab’s alliance with the more moderate Islamic Courts. Today, Al Shabab and the Courts are barely on speaking terms. They control mostly separate swaths of southern Somalia and, according to sources in Mogadishu, squabble over land in those regions where their presences overlap.

While Al Shabab has few friends in Mogadishu, many city residents are cautiously optimistic that the resurgence of more moderate Islamic groups will mean a measure of law and order not seen in Somalia for two years. The Ethiopians’ stated desire to withdraw their roughly 50,000 troops, plus political infighting between the northern clans, can only hasten the Islamists’ return to power. That the Islamists have left Merka’s aid effort untouched is an indication that regime change might be relatively smooth and minimally bloody.

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