Sunday, January 23, 2011
By JOINT REPORT
Is a Somali “Awakening” in the making?
As the violence peaked, Sunni tribal leaders, previous supporters of the al Qaeda islamist militant group, rebelled because they realised that the outfit was threatening their way of life and existence.
Instead of fighting the American forces in their region, they cooperated with them in taking on the al Qaeda and soon, the movement spread around the country.
Now Somalia could be the scene for a similar “Awakening.”
To their chagrin, international jihadists are learning as Osama Bin Laden did in the 1990s, that Somalis care more about their clans than the Global Jihad.
Analysts are convinced that funding a Somali Awakening, an idea that is already being circulated in Washington DC and Addis Ababa, would bear more fruits and the al Shabaab militia could turn into a nucleus of the future Somali Armed Forces.
They estimate that in Iraq, this counter-insurgence programme, which was called the “Sons of Iraq,” cost Americans roughly $36 million annually, considering it was paying salaries of 10,000 militias at $300 per month in 2005.
The US government transferred the obligation to the Iraqi government in March 2009, that would eventually integrate the “sons” into the Iraqi Army.
The Iraqi government is paying about 95,000 militias at the same rate, hence it is estimated to cost $342 million.
In Somalia, such an operation involving 12,000 forces could cost a maximum of $50 million and the benefits would outweigh the costs.
The African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom) has a budget of $245 million supporting 8,000 troops and auxiliary staff.
It is considered woefully underfunded by UN standards, which require 20,000 troops.
Military strategists believe they are now seeing a parallel handle in Somalia as they found in Anbar.
The highly dreaded Harakat al Shabaab Mujahideen — a transnationalist revolutionary Islamist movement that seeks to establish an emirate in Somalia based on the implementation of Shari’a law — is operating under three levels.
Source: East Africa