After months of muted operations, the jihadist initiative in Somalia starts again with great enthusiasm. A few tens of kilometers northwest of Mogadishu the Islamist militias, driven out of the 2011, have returned to the offensive. Among endless difficulties, the Somali national army is busy plugging the attacks.
The military initiatives would concern the city of Afgooye and would follow a new season of attacks that began in March of the 2016 with the bomb cars in Galkayo (700 km north of the capital) that had already caused dozens of deaths.
The Somali army, reconstituted in the 2009 with the help of the European Union and the United States, has about 6000 men today. Trained in neighboring states (mostly Uganda), the soldiers of Mogadishu enjoy the support of the armed forces of Kenya and Ethiopia directly involved in Somalia since the 2011 with the operation Linda Nchi which put an end to fundamentalist terror.
Despite the downsizing of Al Shabaab, terrorist activities and jihadist infiltration in neighboring countries continued however for all the following years. In addition to the massacre of the Garissa University campus in Kenya of April 2015 (148 dead), the Islamist militants between the 2012 and the 2014 are responsible only in the Nairobi territory for more than 400 dead for attacks on civil and military targets.
Affiliated with Al Qaeda that watches over their fundamentalist Sunni Wahhabi doctrine, the terrorists of Al Shaabab, heirs of the Islamic Courts of the early 2000 years, are given in recovery throughout Somali territory.
In consideration of autonomy de facto of Puntland (the territory around the Horn of Africa) and of Somaliland (the former British Somalia), the current scenario of Somalia does not seem very far from the one immediately following the 1991, after the fall of Siad Barre. The current government of Mogadishu led by Ali Sharmarke is unable to control a minimal part of the national territory.
(photo: Ciidamada qalabka sida)
