Al Qaeda is coming to Somalia!

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Bekele Gedamu
08/15/2006)

The United States, fatigued and enormously distressed by its involvement in the battle against terrorism on various fronts, doesn’t want to hear it. Other Western nations, including England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain prefer to look the other way, hoping the monster will somehow disappear. Well-meaning but misguided journalists think that the al Qaeda presence in Mogadishu is exaggerated, but even if its advent is a bona fide fact, they think the group is toothless.

There is a timidity, not lack of awareness, mind you, evidenced by some in the journalistic community who prefer to report about the incident only when they hear the explosion. Boom! Boom! Boom! Then they will come out from their hideouts, lambasting their governments, saying “why did you wait this long to respond?” This could have easily happened to the Scotland Yard police had they hesitated in capturing the would-be plotters to hijack the airplanes bound to America. One single misstep could have ignited the skies into an inferno of untold and unprecedented devastation.

Sadly, most people, accustomed to conventional warfare – two nations facing each other on a battlefield – Goliath versus David – do not take the battle against terrorism seriously, because the enemy is invisible. This, perhaps, has created the indulgence, a lackadaisical attitude if you will, regarding the determination of the enemy.

But the enemy, alas, is still alive and lethal. In 2003, four years before his death, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi boasted by saying that he will strike at the nodes of his Western enemies, the infidels. Exactly at that point the United States had the opportunity to annihilate him in the Ansar al-Islam base in the Kurdish Muslim region, but the Bush administration missed the chance. Some journalists, even pundits, at the time said he was just an overrated al Qaeda element, with very little powerbase in which to operate.

Guess what? Zarqawi is one reason why the United States is bogged down in Iraq today, with the possibility of civil war looming in that country. The hunt for al-Zarqawi should have been vigorously staged long before the al Qaeda networks attacked a French-owned oil tanker in Yemen, a hotel in Kenya, made an attempt to down an airliner in the Nairobi skies, bombed a temple in Tunisia, a nightclub in Morocco, another nightclub in Bali, a bank in Turkey, and set off a blast at the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. The Jakarta suicide alone that killed 220 people caused the Indonesian economy to suffer by at least a 1 percent drop in the GDP.

Today, the emergence of internationally linked terrorist cells is on the rise. The London plot glaringly exposes that the enemy is not only operating from the outside, but from the inside as well. Its access in south-east Asia is deep. Equally the new elements now operating to destabilize the Middle East are avowed enemies of countries like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Syria, even Iran. There is the illusion, however, particularly in the Middle East that the enemy is only after America. Do we really believe that King Abdullah of Jordan, Kind Fahd of Saudi Arabia, President Mubarak of Egypt and Colonel Gadaffi of Libya will be spared by al Qaeda if bin Laden smashes the Western infidels? And now, forming another lethal front, al Qaeda has come to the Horn of Africa, assisted by a few regional players, while America is silently watching this scenario unfolding from Djibouti. The advent of al Qaeda to Somalia is beginning to look like the al-Zarqawi case, with a let’s watch from a distance attitude. Some believe that it is truly harmless and ineffective.

But Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweyes, a hardliner cleric and the current jihadist leader of the al-Ittihad Islamist faction in Mogadishu, is a known terrorist wanted by the US government. His members in the group are notorious al Qaeda affiliates, some suspected in the bombings in Kenya in 1998. Although today, in an attempt to disguise their identity and affiliation with al Qaeda, they deny their connection; however, they are vehemently loyal to bin Laden. Already a Taliban-like rule is in progress in Mogadishu, with innocent people being killed for the simple act of watching world soccer games.

After trouncing the United States’ backed opposition groups in Somalia and isolating the Somali Transitional Government formed two years ago by the UN and supported by the African Union, the Islamists are beginning to get even more voracious. Their collective vision, as was once pronounced by al-Zarqawi, is to strike at the nodes of the Western enemy. "Destroy America!" is their motto. True, Sheikh Aweyes didn’t make any secret of his destructive intentions. Certainly, bin Laden is pushing Aweyes from his invisible quarters. The al Qaeda boss has an eye on the destruction of the Western embassies in the region, before he marches north to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to effectively oust those leaders.

Should the West turn its head the other way when the fires are raging in the Horn of Africa?

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