Thursday 16 June 2011

Another al-Qaeda leader is no more

Somalia's civil war

One more down


 Fazul fizzles out
IT WAS probably the shifting front line in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, that confused Fazul Abdullah Muhammad close to midnight on June 7th. The ruined streets on the city’s outskirts were unlit. The head of al-Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, one of America’s most wanted men, turned his Toyota Hilux right when he should have gone left. He ended up at a checkpoint manned by Somalia’s transitional federal government (TFG), not the boys of the Shabab militia for whom he was a hero. He pulled a pistol and was shot dead, together with an accomplice.
He was quickly buried. It was not until a lot of cash and a laptop were found in the car that his identity was suspected. His body was exhumed and a DNA sample sent to an FBI laboratory in Nairobi, capital of neighbouring Kenya, to be matched against DNA samples the bureau had obtained from Mr Muhammad’s children in 2007. They matched.
The 37-year-old, originally from the Comoro islands, had been on the run since organising the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Those attacks killed 224 and wounded 5,000, most of them Africans. Mr Muhammad’s features let him pass as an Arab as well as an African. He travelled to Somalia from Tanzania in March on a South African passport under the alias Daniel Robinson. It is unlikely that he ever traded in blood diamonds, as some claimed, but he was probably involved in building closer ties between al-Qaeda cells in Africa, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. He may have co-ordinated two suicide-bomb attacks last year in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, killing 74 people at a restaurant and in a club as they watched the football World Cup final.
Mr Muhammad was the last survivor among the al-Qaeda people responsible for the embassy bombings and for subsequent al-Qaeda attacks in Mombasa in 2002. In 2009 Saleh Ali Nabhan, a Kenyan, was killed in Somalia in an American helicopter attack. This latest death, so soon after Osama bin Laden’s, is another blow to the Islamists who control south Somalia. Shabab fighters have lost ground in Mogadishu to African Union and TFG forces. They may be forced out of their redoubt in the city’s Bakara market. Depriving them of its revenue could tip the economic balance in favour of the TFG, which already controls the port and the airport.
But the fighting is still fierce. The Ugandan army, which has 5,200 troops in Mogadishu, together with 4,400 Burundians, has lost several soldiers this month, including an inspirational officer. And the TFG’s interior minister was recently killed by a Shabab suicide-bomber; the port has also been attacked.
Whether the Islamists will collapse or rally now depends largely on the performance of the TFG. A deal signed on June 9th between Somalia’s president, Sharif Ahmed, and parliament’s speaker, Hassan Aden, was meant to put off elections until 2012 and give the TFG time to extend its control beyond Mogadishu. But the agreement also called for the removal of the popular prime minister, Abdullahi Muhammad, which sparked street protests—and he has vowed to carry on.
The squabbling deepens the division between those, such as Abdullahi Muhammad, who want an accountable government drawn from across Somalia, and others, perhaps including Mr Aden, a cattle-trader, who seek to advance clan and commercial interests. Unless Abdullahi Muhammad’s vision prevails, the extremists who will surely take up the al-Qaeda banner will be hard to beat.

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