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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 9, No. 6

Publication Date: June 25, 2022

DOI:10.14738/assrj.96.12403. Issa-Salwe, A. M., Shafat, A. D. (2022). Somalia and the Islamist War: Assessing the Probability of Al-Shabab Winning or Losing the

War with Somalia. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 9(6). 281-290.

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

Somalia and the Islamist War: Assessing the Probability of Al- Shabab Winning or Losing the War with Somalia

Abdisalam M Issa-Salwe

Abdifatah D Shafat

ABSTRACT

In this article, we assess the ongoing conflict between al-Shabaab on the one hand,

and the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and the African Union

Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), on the other. Though al-Shabab has been around

since the mid 2000s, the current round of the conflict began in 2010 when AMISOM

was deployed to Somalia to bolster the fledgling Somali government. The main

thrust of the paper, therefore, is to reexamine what effect, if any, this African force

has had on the conflict. Data were collected from 2009-2021 through monitoring

and analysis was done using software. Data gathered included recording specific

instances of violence between the two groups, including who orchestrated the

violence, the location of the violence and the fatalities in each act of violence. While

TFG/AMISOM made substantial gains initially against al-Shabab, the result did not

specifically conclude which of the two groups is poised to win the war. However, it

demonstrates that al-Shabab is able to stay in play by resorting to a host of other

strategies which neither the TFG nor AMISOM can deploy.

Keywords: Transitional Federal Government (TFG), Federal Government (FG), African

Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), Union Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS), al-Shabaab,

Islamic Courts Union (ICU), al-Ittihad al-Islamiya, Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahideen

INTRODUCTION

This study examines the ongoing conflict between al-Shabab on the one hand, and the Somali

Transitional Federal Government (TFG, which would later become the Somali Federal

Government (TFG) and African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM)1, on the other. This phase

of the conflict commenced following the arrival of AMISOM in the country in 2010. Many

analysts predicted the demise of al-Shabab as the robust and effective fighting force that it has

been since its inception, controlling large swaths of south-central Somalia. The analysts quickly

pointed to the setbacks that al-Shabab suffered, including its lose of ground, defections of its

fighters, and the constriction of its source of finances. However, these predictions have not

come to pass; instead, al-Shabab has grown more bold, lethal, and dangerous.

This study investigates the trajectory that the conflict had taken, and the impact of AMISOM in

trying to beat back al-Shabab and bring about peace and stability to this war torn country.

Despite suffering heavy loses in the beginning, al-Shabab, as resilient as ever, bounced back and

now presents a serious threat to Somalia and its neighbors. Moreover, its unique capacity to

1 African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) has changed its mission to Union Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS) from 01

April 2022. ATMIS task include to hand over security responsibilities to Somalia's national army and withdraw from Somalia after a

few more years.

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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol. 9, Issue 6, June-2022

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

adapt to new fighting situations makes it a force to reckon with and Somalia an unsafe place. To

this end, the study has been collecting raw data to project whether al-Shabab will win or lose

this war. The centrepiece of this data is the tracking of al-Shabab's violent, day-to-day attacks

from 2009 to 2021. The data focus on particular elements of al-Shabab's violent activities, such

as the sequence of events, date and description of events, sources, actors, targets, rationale,

causality, and location.

A VIOLENT BIRTH

Al-Shabab's full name in Arabic is Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahideen, translating into the

Movement of Striving Youth (Lydon, 2018).It is, however, popularly known as al-Shabab. Al- Shabab is not the first Islamist group in Somalia, though it is the most notorious. Still, unlike

those groups that came before it, its violent birth is insightful in understanding its operations

in the larger Horn of Africa. Like any other group, al-Shabab's presence was felt not only

through its violent activities but also symbolically, including its military buildup, efficient

administrative structure, and its extreme ideological inclinations that reverberate across the

entire Horn of Africa.

Despite its prolonged presence, how al-Shabab came into being has stoked both controversy

and debate. One of the first explanations of al-Shabab’s rise theorisesthat it emerged out of the

ashes of the defunct al-Ittihad al-Islamiya (AIAI) (CISAC, 2010). This argument asserts that

some Somali youth members of AIAI had travelled to the northern town of Las Anod for a

conference that sought to debate the way forward. A dozen or so of the youth in attendance

stormed out in rage as the conference progressed. The youngsters were not the typical Somali

youth but battle-hardened veterans who had participated in foreign wars (Shinn, 2011). Their

contention followed from a proposal made at the meeting to form a Salafi

politicalorganisationwhich they considered too acquiescent(ibid). Later, these youth convened

a parallel meeting where al-Shabab was born.

Two other claims purport to expound on al-Shabab’s rise, illustrating how convoluted al- Shabab's origins are (Felbab-Brown, 2015). The first of these suggests that both ICU and AIAI

have contributed to al-Shabab's emergence in equal measure. The assertion presented in this

strand is that disgruntled members from both groups had come together to form al-Shabab. On

the other hand, the third one insists that al-Shabab had already been in existence under the

defunct ICU (Bryden, 2014). After ICU lost ground in the southern city of Kismayo to the

Ethiopians in 2007, its fighters melted away (Ibid.). The assertion is that al-Shabab was home

to the more radical elements within the ICU who forked out into rural Somalia and subsequently

reconstituted itself as a new outfit called al-Shabab. While it is beyond the scope of this paper

to determine the veracity of these claims, we point to the fact that they all concur in very

significant ways. For example, they all agree that al-Shabab had not been formed from scratch

but had evolved from a previously existing group. They also highlight that those who

constituted the core of al-Shabab and set the tone for it primarily derived from hardline

members of the preceding groups from which they were born(Lydon, 2018)

From the moment al-Shabab felt emasculated enough to militarily take on what was left of the

clan-based militias and Ethiopia, it began to construct a multifaceted image of itself as

representing one thing, while deploying many different strategies to attain that goal. The one

idea that al-Shabab tirelessly sought to pursue was the Islamist face(Afyare, 2012). Al-Shabab