“When All Muslims Unite …”: Islamism, Identification, and Western Fears of Terrorism in Africa

Abstract

The rapidly successful expulsion from Somalia in early January 2007 of Islamist faction the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) provides a tempting tactical model for countering terrorism in far-flung locations. Yet, in some respects, the success of the model was surprising. The Union of Islamic Courts took Mogadishu in early June 2006, and steadily expanded its control across the southern portion of Somalia, meeting little resistance. The UIC seemed so secure in its control of southern Somalia that, until the eve of its defeat, it boasted openly of ambitions of creating a united Islamic “Greater Somalia,” including all of breakaway Somaliland, Djibouti, and parts of Ethiopia. The operation was carried out by Ethiopian ground and air forces on behalf of the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which was constituted through regional negotiations in Kenya more than two years ago but had never gained more than a tenuous hold in the provincial town of Baidoa, far from the capital of Mogadishu. The Ethiopians acted with the tacit approval of Washington, and received minimal participation from U.S. Special Forces advisers. Faced with overwhelming firepower from the Ethiopians, the Islamist faction fell like a house of cards, its leaders and militias melting away under cover of darkness rather than waging a fight. Their displacement and the subsequent installment of the TFG in Mogadishu was followed by U.S. air strikes in Mogadishu and along the Kenyan border against alleged Al Qaeda operatives allied to the deposed Islamists. Even before the Pentagon indicated whether or not those air strikes had hit their intended targets—Abu Talha al-Sudani, a Sudanese national suspected by the U.S. of being a long-time associate of Osama bin Laden based in East Africa, and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, two other alleged Al Qaeda operatives suspected in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa—U.S. military strategists were already indicating that the combined use of selective strikes and “surrogate forces” like the Ethiopians provided a “blueprint ... they hoped to use more frequently in counterterrorism missions around the globe.” Targeting suspected terrorists using military methods, however, is at best a dubious enterprise. Certainly, the killing and/or arrest of key known associates of Osama bin Laden has undermined and isolated the group’s core leadership. The death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the supposed leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, however, did little to defuse the violent insurgency there. While the impact of the U.S. air strikes on possible terror-related activity in Somalia may always be uncertain, the effects of those attacks