After chasing kidnappers across the border, the Kenyan army is digging in for the longer term in Somalia

As the Kenyan army ventured deeper into Somalia, in its first cross-border campaign in 44 years, a regional grand strategy to deal with Al Haraka al Shabaab al Mujahideen is beginning to emerge. Kenya’s intervention was under detailed consideration several weeks before Nairobi’s official declaration of war against Al Shabaab on 15 October. There is little substance to media claims that United States diplomats based in Nairobi were surprised by Kenya’s operation. Both the USA and Britain run substantive regional counter-terrorism operations from Nairobi.

Although the mobilisation was initially announced as a ‘hot pursuit’ operation against Somali-based groups who had kidnapped tourists in north-eastern Kenya, President Mwai Kibaki’s government and Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG) quickly characterised the military campaign as a coordinated effort, even if Kenya appeared to be acting unilaterally.

According to Lieutenant Colonel Paddy Ankunda of the African Union Mission in Somalia, the current military campaigns are part of a ‘longer-term strategy to create a peaceful Somalia.’ Amisom’s first priority was to liberate Mogadishu and then Kismayo from the grip of Al Shabaab fighters, Ankunda said. ‘We are working with allied Somali forces in south-western and western Somalia.’ He pointed to the complexity of the military situation on the Somalia-Kenya border, where several militia groups are operating, some in alliance with and some independently of Al Shabaab.

Ankunda claims the Ahlu Sunna wal Jama’ah and Ras Kamboni militias (just north of the border) were both receiving financing from supporters in Kenya. Those groups – which some believe may have been behind the tourist abductions, seeking to sell their hostages to Al Shabaab or others – appear to have scattered for now in the face of the Kenyan army’s invasion. A much more elaborate strategy was outlined by Major Emmanuel Chirchir of Kenya’s Defence Ministry, which ties Nairobi into longer-term intervention. He said the regional plan for Amisom was to expand the TFG’s forces radially from Mogadishu: both Somali and Western officials claim that Al Shabaab has been effectively banished, although sceptics see this much more as a strategic retreat by the militia (AC Vol 52 No 20, Al Shabaab sets the agenda).

Ethiopia’s example
It had long been agreed, Chirchir said, that if the TFG forces were not able to repulse Al Shabaab and ‘threat levels went up’, neighbouring states would confront Al Shabaab inside Somalia. That raises the possibility of another intervention by Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s government, which sent its troops into Somalia in December 2006 to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union regime, which had been unwise enough to propose the forcible reunification of ethnic Somali territory, including Ethiopia’s Ogaden Region. Ethiopian troops stayed two years and bequeathed the current unstable and foreign-backed TFG regime to Somalia. Some factions from the Islamic Courts regime changed their rhetoric, such as Sheikh Sherif Sheikh Ahmed, now TFG President; others took a harder line and joined forces with Al Shabaab.

Although Ethiopia’s experience suggests that Kenyan troops could face a long hard slog, Chirchir is undaunted: ‘Based on our success so far, it’s going to be a quick operation.’ His colleagues were claiming that Kenyan forces had killed over 70 Shabaab forces by 19 October as they marched towards the militia’s base at Afmadow.

Kenya is further helped by the strong support that its invasion of south-central Somalia is getting from the TFG in Mogadishu and the AU forces (Ugandan and Burundian) already in the country. Somalis outside government sound far less enthusiastic and fear more ‘collateral damage’.

On 18 October, Kenya’s Foreign Minister, Moses Wetangula, and defence Minister Yusuf Haji met their Somali counterparts at a heavily guarded office in Mogadishu. While they were discussing strategy, a car bomb exploded outside a Foreign Ministry building killing six people. The prospect of a general escalation of hostilities within and on the borders of Somalia alarms civilians.

While the Kenyan forces tried to drive Al Shabaab fighters from their southern Somali strongholds, TFG officials said their forces were launching a new offensive from Mogadishu. Chirchir insisted this campaign, in which TFG forces would lead the assault on Shabaab bases outside the capital, was coordinated with the support of Amisom. The TFG Spokesman, Abdirahman Omar Osman, spoke of a close alliance between Mogadishu and Nairobi. ‘Kenya and Somalia are in agreement on security issues. The Kenyan troops were deployed to reinforce security in Somalia. They have been helping our troops logistically and with training.’

All this represents a sharp turn in Kenyan policy, with successive governments studiously avoiding any military involvement in Somalia. Instead, Kenya’s main contribution has been to host conferences to form transitional governments to run Somalia, albeit with almost no popular mandate or grassroots support. A prime concern for the Nairobi government is the 2.4 million strong Kenyan Somali population and the 600,000 Somali refugees in centres such as the camps around Dadaab in the already troubled North-East Province.

Although the Kenyan authorities said the recent abduction of tourists along the Kenyan coast had prompted their invasion, there is little agreement about which militias are responsible or their motives. Whether or not it is responsible for the kidnappings, Al Shabaab may now benefit from the ill-will that the Kenyan forces will generate if many civilians are killed during its new operation – on both sides of the border.

Some Somali groups warn that the action could steer some young and frustrated Kenyan Somalis towards Al Shabaab and other militia groups which have stepped up recruitment inside Kenya. On 19 October, the Kenyan government announced a sweeping internal crackdown on sympathisers of Al Shabaab and illegal immigrants in densely populated centres such as Nairobi’s Eastleigh district.

Panic in Lamu
Some witnesses say the kidnappings along Kenya’s coast were carried out by groups linked to the Somali pirates whose operations have come under pressure from heavier international maritime policing in the region. The kidnappings generated panic. The resort town of Lamu, favoured by (relatively) wealthy European tourists, emptied within days and this at the start of the tourist high season, which this year was forecast to generate a record US$1 billion in revenue.

Those abductions were further aggravated by the kidnapping of two Spanish aid workers in the sprawling Dadaab refugee camp. This was the shot that sent Kenya’s armed forces into south-central Somalia. Invoking Article 61 of the United Nations charter on territorial integrity, some 1,600 Kenyan troops launched their first cross-border military offensive, Operation Linda Nchi (Protect the Nation), since the end of the Shifta War in 1967. Derided in the region for their lack of fighting experience, the Kenyan armed forces have deployed mechanised infantry with aerial cover from fighter aircraft and helicopter gunships. We hear that Somali TFG troops will be joining them in the battle for Afmadow.

The real prize, though, is the port city of Kismayo. Both Kenya’s military and its Amisom counterparts believe that the capture of Kismayo, from which Al Shabaab now derives much of its revenue, will choke off the militants.

Military sources hinted that cross-border troop movements had begun some days before the formal announcement on 15 October. They also suggest that troop deployments along the Kenya-Somali border had begun as early as November 2010, when the army’s Operations Command was shifted from Nairobi to the northern town of Garissa. Similarly, increased troop movements in the North- Eastern Province, which borders Somalia, coincided with the cancellation of military training programmes for Kenyan Somalis who were meant to join up with TFG forces. In a recent interview with this correspondent, Prime Minister Raila Amolo Odinga said that the government had abandoned these training programmes when many of the Somali recruits went absent without leave. Odinga had hinted then, two weeks before the start of Kenya’s military campaign, that it was time for his government to intervene directly in Somalia.

However, the crisis may throw into sharper focus the links between the militia groups, their financiers, drugs and arms traffickers and the growth of institutional corruption in Kenya (AC Vol 52 No 9, Sinking the pirates). A new report* by Peter Gastrow argues that collaboration between corrupt officials and politicians in Nairobi and transnational criminal networks is critically undermining the capacity of the government. The report points to the growth of heroin transshipments through Kenya from Iran and Pakistan and the way that militias in Somalia have started to profit from drugs trafficked into Kenya. The port of Kismayo, currently controlled by Al Shabaab in southern Somalia, has become an important staging post for drug consignments en route to Kenya.

No one, including Gastrow, can reliably say how much of this criminal activity is linked to politics and militias, and there are many grey areas, with gun runners aligning to certain militia groups for mainly financial reasons.

Similarly, experts differ over the links between Al Shabaab and Somali pirates. Colonel John Steed, Principal Military Advisor at the UN Political Office Somalia, speaks of growing cooperation between Al Shabaab, which he says is desperate for funds after its ejection from Mogadishu, and pirates and other criminal gangs.

Yet others argue that although Al Shabaab sometimes imposes taxes on pirate groups there are no established logistical links between pirates and the Islamist fighters.

More important as a root cause is the discontent along the Kenya Coast, where landlessness, youth unemployment and historical grievances have made the area a recruiting ground for the militias, which promise a mixture of religious rectitude and a share of the substantial financial proceeds. Indeed, some link the abduction of two tourists, Judith Tebutt and Marie Dedieu (who died while being held hostage in Kismayo), to groups out to sabotage the tourism industry as a way of highlighting the economic marginalisation of Coastal communities. Over the past year, several groups, notably the Mombasa Republican Council, a non-violent organisation advocating for Coastal secession from Kenya, have emerged. The MRC, whose slogan is Pwani Si Kenya (literally, ‘The Coast is not Kenya’), is said to have recruited up to two million members.

The core issue is less whether Kenya’s conventional forces can outgun Al Shabaab but whether, in alliance with the 9,000 or so Amisom troops, they can face down the militias long enough to allow the shaky TFG to consolidate power. Having pushed Al Shabaab out of Mogadishu and crucially, Bakara Market, which reportedly accounted for about half of the militia’s income, about US$100 mn. a year, Amisom’s wanted to press its advantage. with its new Kenyan allies.

Source: AFRICA CONFIDENTIAL