Why Somalia must rise up UK agenda
I’ve just come up for air after several weeks investigating claims that dozens of Islamic extremists have returned to Britain from training camps in Somalia.
The security services believe that they may end up using the skills they have learned in Somalia to commit acts of terror here in the UK.
Nobody knows just how many have been there and come back.
But no doubt it is a tiny minority of British Somalis giving the security services something of a headache, as well as stigmatising an entire Somali community struggling to settle here.
If you cross a dirt road from Kenya into Somalia and disappear, then nobody is keeping numbers. Though I gather there has been a marked increase in police questioning of Somalis re-entering the UK at Heathrow.
Few Somalis I have spoken to will admit there is a problem. A study of immigrants by the Institute for Public Policy Research in 2005 included data which suggested Somalis have the highest unemployment and lowest earnings of any ethnic group here.
Watch Jonathan Rugman’s report
Somalis are already associated with gang and knife crime. So being labelled as terrorists is the last thing they need.
Turn on a camera, and even a Somali who does admit privately that there is a problem with radicalism may well say quite the opposite.
One man’s terrorist is of course another man’s freedom fighter. Somalia was invaded by Ethiopia in 2006, so flying in from Ealing or Tower Hamlets to push the invaders out might have seemed like a noble cause.
The problem is, what do you then do with the bomb-making skills you’ve acquired? Let them gather dust, or use the kudos from fighting in the motherland to recruit jihadists to help you set off bombs here in the UK?
We could of course ask the returned jihadists themselves, but how do we set about interviewing them to find out what their opinion is of the UK, if Britain’s anti-terror laws mean we will be obliged to hand over all our material to the police?
The authorities here are concerned by the extreme radical views of those groups who may be training British jihadists; what once may have seemed like a noble cause for the liberation of Somalia has fragmented into Islamists of various hues, vying for power.
Al-Shabaab or “The Youth” began as the armed wing of the deposed Islamic Courts administration. Now it is something else; as per my last piece on the subject, it is battle-hardened, steeped in blood and apparently determined to oust the moderate new president, Sheikh Sharif, elected under UN auspices.
The Atlantic Monthly reported that last November al-Shabaab stoned a 13-year-old girl to death for the crime of being raped. Suspected spies are beheaded with knives. As Rageh Omaar put it on Channel 4 News last night, Ethiopia’s invasion has created Frankenstein’s monster.
I couldn’t go to Somalia myself. Too many of my colleagues, including Martin Adler and Kate Peyton, have been killed there.
But an incredibly brave and talented Somali journalist was prepared to take risks on our behalf.
Extraordinarily, he let himself be blindfolded and driven for 16 hours to meet Sheikh Hassan al-Turki, leader of the Raskamboni militia and something of a godfather to the Islamists occupying swathes of southern Somalia.
Turki is wanted for his alleged involvement in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
A senior counter-terrorist source told me he is “one of the most senior Islamist militants in East Africa”.
“The camps are mobile and not fixed targets” my source continued. Our journalist wasn’t allowed to film al-Turki’s tents, but footage of the crater left by a US missile – which failed to kill al-Turki in the town of Dhobley last March – was deemed okay.
Al-Turki denies harbouring al-Qaida. The CIA thinks otherwise.
“Unarguably, there are training camps….to prepare them for the kind of combat that al-Qaida and its affiliates want to impose on us,” was how outgoing CIA Director General Michael Hayden put it last month.
“The Ethiopian move into Somalia a year or two ago has catalysed Somalis and it has affected the Somali expatriate community around the world”.
Which is ironic, given that the Americans supported the Ethiopians in the Bush “war against terror” and still do.
The Americans have their own problem with Somalis disappearing – in their case from Minnesota, apparently to join the jihad. (See Jamestown.org terrorism monitor, 9 January, 2009.)
And the al-Qaida figure in East Africa the Americans want dead or alive is Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, alleged pal of al-Turki and mastermind of the Kenyan and Tanzanian attacks.
The fear, as my source puts it, is that “Ethiopia’s withdrawal will create more space for terrorism training camps”.
But I’m not sure this is right. The place was pretty lawless – “ungoverned space” as the intelligence community calls it – before the Ethiopians came along.
After all, this has been one of the world’s worst failed states for years.
Though if al-Shabaab take over the country – and even if they don’t – who knows how many wannabe jihadists will join them.
Though from what I can gather, the Somali warlords think many expatriate Somalis and foreigners are something of a joke, who can’t cope with the weather and the terrain, don’t understand the clan system and are pretty useless in battle.
What is clear is that engaging with Somalia needs to rise far higher up the UK agenda. Key to that may be supporting Sheikh Sharif, if that helps create a government in a country which has gone without one for the best or worst part of 20 years.
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