Fighting in Somalia is prompting large numbers of civilians to flee into Kenya. Photo: IRIN

Somalia’s president has declared a state of emergency following weeks of intense fighting between Islamic militants and pro-government forces. Over the weekend, the government requested foreign troops from neighboring countries to help stabilize the troubled nation.

Somali President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed has blamed al-Shabab, a radical Islamist group with alleged ties to al-Qaeda, for the surge in violence. Control over the failed state is split between many groups.

The nation has had no effective government since 1991, and one third of the population requires food aid. Read more: Q&A: Answers to lawlessness in Somalia.

Michael Keating is the senior fellow and associate director at the Center for Democracy and Development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He writes at Worldfocus contributor World Politics Review about Kenya’s response to the Somali government’s request for intervention.

As the world was riveted to the events in Iran last week, the beleaguered government of Somalia put out an S.O.S. for international military support in its deteriorating fight against al Shabab guerrillas and other radical opposition forces. Thus far, only Kenyan government officials have publicly responded with threats of military intervention.

But there remains the possibility that troops from Ethiopia, Djibouti, the Sudan and Uganda might be deployed in a combined warmaking/peacekeeping operation under the banner of the African Union and other international and regional organizations. More than 5,000 peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi are currently deployed to protect government operations in and around Mogadishu, but in recent days they have been targeted by anti-government militants who refuse to recognize their neutral status.

The response from Kenya seems to suggest that the profile of the intervention would shift from peacekeeping to combat operations against al Shabab. In response, a spokesman for al Shabab said that any foreign troops “would be sent home in coffins.”

Kenya has many reasons to try to deal with the chaos on its border. The primary one is al Shabab’s close ties with al-Qaida, which put Kenya in the crosshairs of international jihadists. Both the U.S. embassy bombing in Nairobi in 1998 as well as the subsequent Paradise Hotel bombing in Kikambala were coordinated by al-Qaida-backed operatives coming across Kenya’s long and virtually unpoliced border with Somalia. Kenya also has problems with its own homegrown militants, many of whom train and get both financing and weapons from Somali brethren.

Another reason for Kenyan concern is the rapid increase in recent weeks in the number of Internally Displaced Persons arriving at border towns along the Kenya-Ethiopia border. There are already 160,000 Somali refugees in the Dadaab camps on the Kenyan side of the border, most of whom have been living there since the early 1990s.

[...]This is a developing situation that the Europeans and Americans should pay careful attention to. The recent “World War” in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which troops from multiple foreign countries ran riot for several years in the name of stabilization, led to millions of civilian deaths. Somalia has far fewer riches than the Congo to plunder, but no matter what happens, civilians are likely to bear the brunt of the fighting. And any survey of Somali history suggests that nothing radicalizes the population like an invasion of foreigners.

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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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Photo courtesy of Flickr user ISN Security Watch under a Creative Commons license.