Three weeks into their offensive against Somalia’s Shabab Islamist militia, Kenyan forces are preparing for what’s likely to be a decisive battle for the southern Somali port of Kismayo, which could either end Shabab’s dominance in the region or add fuel to Somalia’s decades-long civil war. Mohammed Yusuf reports.

Even if the Kenyan military succeeds in capturing the port, its exit strategy is far from clear. Already, the Kenyan forces, which have never fought a war like this before, appear unexpectedly bogged down.

Kenya is pressing its attack on 10 Somali towns on the approaches to Kismayo. It’s made clear that its aim is to seize the city, Somalia’s main southern seaport and Shabab’s most lucrative possession. The United Nations estimates that port revenues provide Shabab up to $50 million a year, or roughly half of its total funds.

On Monday, the Kenyan and Somali governments issued a joint appeal for international support in blockading Kismayo until Shabab’s grip on the city is broken. But the role of other countries in the Kenyan offensive is unclear, though the United States believes Shabab is an al Qaida affiliate and that Somalia is a front line in the war on terror.

Kenya blames Shabab for a string of recent kidnappings targeting Western aid workers and tourists inside Kenyan territory. Shabab has denied responsibility but has threatened revenge attacks in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, East Africa’s most important city. Last week, a Kenyan citizen confessed to being a member of Shabab and planning two grenade attacks on Oct. 24 in Nairobi. The youth, a Muslim convert from Kenya’s rural western provinces, was promptly sentenced to life imprisonment.

With no roads in much of the Somali countryside, heavy rains have slowed Kenya’s tank-equipped infantry to a near halt. That’s left most of the offensive to Kenya’s air force, the region’s strongest, while Kenyan-trained Somali government troops and friendly militias have led the way on the ground.

Reached by phone, residents of Kismayo say that their city has been under steady aerial attack since the Kenyan offensive began Oct. 16. Abdirizak Ahmed, 31, said people are fleeing areas near the port and near Shabab encampments for fear of becoming collateral damage. But the rains have hampered them, too.

“With all this rain we cannot flee out of Kismayo, but we are adapting quickly to the situation by leaving areas close to Shabab,” said Ahmed, who lives in the Hangash neighborhood near the Kismayo seaport.

To date, Shabab forces have avoided direct contact with the Kenyan troops, preferring instead to ambush Kenyan supply lines, a likely sign of the guerrilla tactics Kenyan forces would face if their invasion becomes a drawn-out affair.
But that’s unlikely to be the case as the first major battle shapes up between the Kenyans and Shabab forces at Afmadow, an important trade hub about 50 miles north of Kismayo that the Kenyan military says it is preparing to capture and Shabab forces are congregating to defend.

Besides Afmadow and Kismayo, the Kenyan military also has targeted Burgavo, a corridor for fishing and charcoal trades, and has overrun Ras Kamboni, a port town near the Kenyan border that’s considered a launching pad for the lucrative piracy trade.

According to residents reached by phone, the Shabab have called in hundreds of fighters from other regions of Somalia to counter the assault. Some of the Shabab reinforcements are believed to have been redeployed from Mogadishu, which the rebels largely abandoned in August.

The effects of the military campaign are evident in Kismayo’s streets, said Hussein Abdi, 24, who said injured fighters are streaming into the town.

Amal Khalif, a 38-year-old mother of six from Kismayo’s Aalenley neighborhood, said the Shabab leadership appears to be making a last-minute attempt to bolster local goodwill, which had suffered from the group’s ultraconservative interpretation of Islamic theology that led to bans on a wide range of popular items, from bras to music.

“They are trying to be nice to people now that things have turned worse for them,” Khalif said. “I have seen them of late trying to win the trust of the public by treating them kinder and releasing some prisoners, especially youths they have jailed for petty issues like haircut styles and those they accuse of indiscipline towards their men.”
But while she hopes to be freed of Shabab rule, she worries about the damage likely to be caused by a prolonged battle for the port’s control.

Vanquishing the Shabab in Kismayo is unlikely to lead to stability for the city’s residents, many there say. Once in control, Somalia’s government will have to contend with the demands of local semi-autonomous administrations and clan warlords also seeking a cut of the revenue pie.

How the government would keep control of the port also is an open question. Kenya and Somalia have called for the expansion of the African Union’s peacekeeping force, now numbering 9,000 troops, primarily from Uganda and Burundi, to patrol areas wrested from Shabab control.

But the Somali government is suspicious that Kenya might want to leave troops behind to create a buffer zone against the possibility of a Shabab return. The Somali government fears such a buffer zone would turn into another semi-autonomous region outside its control, similar to Puntland in the country’s north, which has operated autonomously for years.

An extended stay by Kenyan troops also could end up promoting a Shabab renaissance, as nationalist forces flock to battle a foreign invader. That’s what happened after 2006, when Ethiopia invaded with strong U.S. military backing to take down the Islamic Courts Union, a coalition that had succeeding in taking power in Mogadishu and establishing some semblance of law and order.

Shabab then was a minority extremist wing of the ICU. But it pulled back to the south and launched a heavy insurgency against the Ethiopian occupiers, who later pulled out, unable to quell the rebellion.
Kenya hopes this time will be different, in part because Somalis don’t share the same levels of historic antagonism against Kenyans as they do against their archrival Ethiopians, but also because analysts believe that Shabab is weakened. But that doesn’t stop some analysts from believing an extended Kenyan presence could become a Shabab rallying cry.

By all assessments, the Kenyan incursion has been bad for aid efforts for the estimated 750,000 people in southern Somalia in danger from starvation because of the area’s prolonged drought — the current rains came too late to be of any value to farmers.

Oxfam International, an aid group, has called for diplomatic engagement, saying that “in the past military action in Somalia has had a negative impact on civilians and further reduced access for aid agencies.”
The medical relief group Doctors Without Borders said that a Kenyan air assault Sunday on the town of Jilib killed five civilians. Kenya’s military says the airstrike was targeting a Shabab camp next to a camp for famine victims. Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga promised to investigate the civilian deaths.

Kenyan troops and tanks pushed 50 miles into Somalia on Monday and Kenyan aircraft bombed suspected terrorist positions in the first stage of a military campaign intended to destroy the Islamist insurgent group al Shabab. Mohammed Yusuf reports.

The spokesman of al Shabab, a group Washington says has links to al Qaida, warned the Kenyan government that its “tall buildings won’t be left standing” if the invasion continues.

“If you live in a glass house, don’t throw stones,” Ali Mohamud Rage, the spokesman, said in a not-so-veiled threat to Kenya’s booming capital, Nairobi, which hosts one of the continent’s largest Western diplomatic and aid corps, but also a large, restless Somali immigrant population that has made Kenya’s leaders cautious about intervening directly in Somali affairs.

On Saturday, however, the Kenyan government invoked its right of self-defense to go after al Shabab forces in the group’s drought-stricken haven of southern Somalia after a wave of kidnappings raised questions about whether Kenya was able to defend its borders against Somali encroachers.

A British tourist and an elderly French resident were kidnapped three weeks apart by gunmen near the resort island Lamu on the Indian Ocean near Kenya’s border with Somalia. The husband of the British tourist was shot dead in the incident.

Then, last week, armed attackers abducted two Spanish employees of the French aid group Doctors Without Borders who were working in Kenya’s vast Dadaab refugee camp near the Somali border.

Shabab has denied responsibility for the kidnappings and has accused the Kenyan government of conspiring for an excuse to launch an invasion.

Somalia’s transitional government, which barely controls the capital, Mogadishu, and has fought a years-long battle against al Shabab, took advantage of the Kenyan invasion to launch its own offensive, which reportedly was supported by Kenyan air and ground forces.

Monday night, the Kenyan military was camped at Qoqani, 50 miles inside southwestern Somalia, according to a Somali government military commander who was also positioned there.

The commander, Mohammed Salat, said government forces and an allied militia, Ras Kamboni, had seized control of Afmadow, a major town 85 miles inside Somalia.

A spokesman for the Ras Kamboni group, Abdinasir Serar Mah, confirmed by phone that his group is fighting with the support of the Kenyan military.

Reached by phone, a Shabab fighter among those who withdrew from Afmadow said that the group was regrouping to launch a counteroffensive, but he also described confusion stemming from the group’s divided leadership.

“We retreated back without firing a single bullet or coming face to face with any of them,” said the Shabab fighter, who goes by the name of Abu Yunis. Members of Shabab often take on pseudonyms within the organization.

“We are not used to this pressure. We were always the people who launched offensive attacks until we captured a place, but not lately,” he said. “Our commanders are not giving us clear instructions. They have different opinions on how to go about this whole war.”

Abu Yunis predicted that Shabab’s Somali opponents will retreat once Shabab counterattacks, but “we expect the Kenyans will try to stand and fight, but they will face the pain of bullets.”

The Kenyan offensive appears aimed in the direction of Kismayo, a major Somali seaport 75 miles from Afmadow that has been a major source of Shabab funding. Capturing Kismayo has long been a goal for Somalia’s Mogadishu leadership and Western backers.

Shabab has appeared in a weakened position since August when it withdrew from Mogadishu amid speculation that the group was running out of money and was split by divisions among its leaders over how to deal with the drought that has devastated southern Somalia. The United Nations has declared that hundreds of thousands are in danger of starvation, but Shabab had halted most aid missions.

The coordination between Kenya and Somalia’s own transitional government, which offered only weak criticism of the incursion, was a reminder that the transitional government is in Mogadishu only because of a U.S.-backed invasion by Ethiopia in 2006 that unseated a coalition Islamic government and sparked the Shabab insurgency.

Historically, Somalis have shown a strong aversion to foreign interference, and any outside move by Western players hoping to stabilize the country and curb the influence of militant Islamism always carries the threat of backfiring.

Abu Yunis said the presence of the Kenyan troops eventually would unite Somalis behind al Shabab.

“It’s nice to have the Kenyan army here for some time. Surely they will misbehave, and we will gain the support of the people,” he said. “We would love for them to leave, but if they are staying, we want them to stay long.”

An explosion in Mogadishu today killed at least four people as Kenyan troops continued their offensive against al Shabaab in southern Somalia where locals are fleeing the violence. Mohammed Yusuf reports.

Kenya’s military forces have moved 150 km into southern Somalia and are attacking al-Shabaab bases in the Juba region in response to the wave of kidnappings inside Kenya. Kenyan officials say they want to push al-Shabaab back and secure the border. So far, al-Shabaab fighters have not put up a fight and are retreating from their positions. Thousands of residents of the town of Afmadow have fled their homes for fear of being caught in the fight between the Kenyan troops, Somali forces and al-Shabaab. Farah is one of the Afmadow residents.

“I am on my way to the border between Kenya and Somalia. A helicopter is bombarding the town, so many forces are heading that side, the other group, al-Shabab, is digging trenches and they are saying they are going to fight back and they are telling people to fight alongside them and to defend the country from enemies.”

Meanwhile police officials in Mogadishu say a suicide car bomb exploded near Somalia’s foreign ministry, killing at least four people, and injuring dozens. The blast came as the Kenyan ministers for defense and foreign affairs are in Mogadishu to update Somali government leaders on their offensive near the border.

In Somalia for the first time in five years internationally recognized government is in control of war ravaged city Mogadishu. The control comes as al shabab announced a surprise withdrawal from the city in late July. Some analysts say humanitarian crisis situation in the country has weakened the group. FSRN’S MOHAMMED YUSUF REPORTS.

After the UN declared famine in Somalia, al-shabab reversed a decision to allow aid agencies into areas under their control. Over the last few weeks, tensions have risen as virtually no aid is reaching people in areas under al shabab’s control. Al-shabab members arrested clan elders who tried to persuade the group to allow in aid or let people venture on their own to get food in government controlled areas and neighboring countries Kenya and Ethiopia. In response, clan militias have started attacking al shabab fighters.

Nairobi-based political analyst Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdisamed says al shabab leaders are divided on how to respond to the ever worsening humanitarian crisis.

“They fail to read the mood of the people, they fail to respond to the needs of the people, they fail to respond the crisis in those particular areas. so when they block the aid entering to the al shabab controlled areas, people are saying enough is enough that has divided them some people have publicly left al shabab.”

AbdiSamed said that the mass movement of people facing starvation and leaving al shabab areas is making it difficult for the militant group to recruit youth. It is still resorting to kidnapping children, and recently gave weapons and cash as a prize to youth who participated in a Koran competition.

Mogadishu’s mayor Mohamud Nur has called on civilians to revolt against Al-shabab.

“People have to stop fearing and fight for their protection, we are telling people to fight against al-shabaab and RISE UP against them. It is better to die while fighting OR they WILL kill you in horrible way.”

Some have criticized the mayor and other government officials for preventing aid workers from going into areas controlled by al-shabab. In mid-September, government forces arrested Turkish humanitarian workers who were attempting to deliver food. Officials say they are trying to protect foreigners until they control more parts of the country.

Paddy Ankunda is a spokesperson for the African union.

“Since al shabab fled the city we have taken over a number of other key places, the area is too big for the soldiers we have at the moment so we had anticipated that it would take about twelve thousand soldiers and we just have nine thousand so we need more.”
Although al shabab has left Mogadishu few people have returned to their homes. Some are concerned the insurgent group is blending into the population and fear revenge attacks following a wave of kidnappings and beheadings of people they accuse of spying for the government.

But al shabab might also be weakening due to an internal rift between its more nationalist leader Abu Mansoor Robow and a more global jihadist leader, Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr. Again, Somali analyst Abdisamed.

“Abu Zubeyr normally pursue global jihadist agenda, normally he likes to have orders from al-Qaeda. Robow is a moderate guy he has a lot of sympathy with the locals then that’s what we call a conflict of interest between those who pursue global jihadist and those who consider local ones.”

More than half of al shabab fighters come from Bay and Bakool regions where Robow has strong support. Some speculate that Robow withdrew all his fighters from Mogadishu after A misunderstanding with Abu Zubeyr about how they should respond to the famine in areas under their control. Many of the Somalis affected are from his own clan and Robow’s community was pressuring him to find a solution to the crisis.

AbdiSamed says al shabab’s al-Qaeda inspired tactics, like suicide bombings, and beheadings, as well as bans on music and watching soccer have isolated the fundamentalist group.

“They are no longer popular now (al shabab) initially Eritrea was publicly helping them, Eritrea now got a lot of pressure from the international community that’s why Isaias Afewerki (Eritrea president) went to Uganda he met with Museveni and got advice from him so where are they going to get some money now, al shabab now they are being isolated internationally and regionally.”

Some observers say a weakening of al shabab gives the US-backed transitional federal government a better opportunity to bring stability to the war-torn country. A recent UN brokered consultative meeting held in Mogadishu established four major benchmarks to end the transition improving security, drafting a constitution, national reconciliation and good governance. Critics have raised concerns about that process, citing a lack of representation of the anti-al shabab paramilitary group, Ahlu-Sunna Wal Jamaa and of leaders from the self declared independent state Somaliland.

Aga Khan University, the Pakistan-based international multi-site higher education institution, is planning to open a new campus in Arusha in northern Tanzania. The campus will house arts and science faculties and educate up to 3,000 students from across East Africa. Its aim will be to attract back to the region East African students who are studying abroad. Mohammed Yusuf reports.

The new campus will be the university’s fourth site in Tanzania, the rest being specialist units teaching nursing, medicine and education, located in the country’s commercial capital Dar es Salaam.

Dr Robert Armstrong, chief academic officer for Aga Khan University in East Africa, stressed that the project was part of a planned US$700 million expansion in East Africa, and that the campus would recruit students from across the region, notably from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.

In particular, said Armstrong, growth of the university is designed to encourage East Africans to conduct their higher education studies in East Africa: “The university will target students from the region who are studying abroad,” he said. “And the university will be attractive enough to recruit those students back into the region.”

He added that the selection procedure will not be based on country quotas, but purely based on the qualities of the students applying from across East Africa. “We will have entry criteria that define students’ abilities; those criteria would be standard across the East African community.”

Also, where students had obvious talent but lacked adequate secondary education, “the university will work to identify students who need special preparations so that they can compete for positions at the university,” said Armstrong, who was previously head of the department of paediatrics at Canada’s University of British Columbia (BC) and chief of paediatric medicine at the BC Children’s Hospital and BC Women’s Hospital.

The Arusha campus development is in its planning phase. Preparation of land for construction is ongoing, but the actual facilities are nowhere near completed. University administration officials told University World News they expect this to happen in 2018.

The campus will be part of an extensive network of Aga Khan centres already operating in East Africa. The university also has campuses in Pakistan and the United Kingdom.

As well as the other Tanzania centres, it offers advanced nursing studies in Kenya and Uganda, aimed at improving nursing practice, patient care and providing nurses from both private and public hospitals an opportunity to further their careers.

It also operates postgraduate medical education programmes in Kenya that are supported by a 250-bed teaching hospital, the Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi.

A key issue going forward will be promoting mutual recognition of academic qualifications within East African countries. An official from the regional political organisation, the East African Community, said it had been working closely with the university on accreditation issues.

Armstrong noted that there is currently no common regional higher education accreditation system. “For now we are accredited by the individual country commissions. Eventually we hope to have an East African structure in place.”

A great deal of red tape regulates higher education institutions in the region. Kenya’s Commission for Higher Education (CHE), for instance, operates comprehensive controls over the adequacy and appropriateness of private institutions and programmes.

George Njine, senior assistant commission secretary for the CHE, said Aga Khan University was one of 10 private universities in Kenya operating with letters of interim authority, while it receives guidance and direction from the commission to prepare for the award of a university charter.

“The commission gives accreditation after a process of quality control and assurance,” he said. Inspections are undertaken before an institution and its programmes are recognised as meeting minimum acceptable standards, and these are based on pre-defined standards. The commission also makes sure a private university’s “quality is equal to the objective and goals as established by the institution,” he added.

Meanwhile, Aga Khan University seems to be generating a positive reputation.

Elijah Githinji Mwangi, who is pursuing a degree in nursing in Nairobi and is set to graduate next February, said he choose Aga Khan after seeing its graduates excel. Lucia Buyanza, who graduated with a bachelor degree in nursing and works with Kenya’s nursing council, said the university offered small classes, specialised learning and research with an emphasis on community service. “I must admit I really had a good learning environment.”

Armstrong said he hoped the university would offer quality education, producing students who were equipped to take a leadership role in East Africa’s professions and politics.

“We want to build a university that attracts students who are engaged in the community that they come from,” he said “We are not focused of the volume of students we can produce, but the quality of the students. Classes will be relatively small, engaging, focusing on social responsibility and opportunities to demonstrate leadership.

“That’s our philosophy,” he told University World News.

The Kenyan government is investigating possible negligence. In the firing line for that, the state-owned Kenya Pipeline Company. But local residents are also being blamed too. eNews Africa Correspondent Mohammed Yusuf reports from Nairobi.

Thousands of Somalis who have trekked vast distance across land where it no longer seem to rain have been pushed to the margins of the over-crowded Dadaab refugee complex, where women and young girls are vulnerable to attacks and sexual abuse when they go into the bushes to collect firewood. Mohammed Yusuf reports.

On the outskirts of north-eastern Kenya’s Ifo refugee camp, which along with Hagadera and Dagahaley makes up a complex now housing almost 400,000 people, a group of twenty women are trudging back from the bush, carrying bundles of firewood on their backs.

Asha Ahmed, 35, who arrived three months ago, says it usually takes them five hours every day to go to bushes to collect firewood and come back to the camp.

“We start our journey to the bush at six in the morning,” she says. “We have to go in a group of about ten people; if we are less than that we don’t go, because there are people in the bush who rape women and young girls.”

Asha has avoided becoming a victim herself, so far, but she says that many others have not been so fortunate.

“I count myself lucky: every day they are so many women raped,” she says. “I don’t know who these people that are doing this … if they are men from host community or refugees themselves.”

It’s very difficult to police the insecure outskirts of the camps, where new arrivals set up their structures made of sticks, flattened milk cans and pieces of cloth.

Khadija Abdi, 50, a mother of three daughters, says they are not even safe from sexual abuse in their makeshift huts.

“We are not safe here, especially at night,” she says. “We sleep in groups of about five in a small hut; we even wake each other up in the middle of the night when one of us wants to go to the latrine. It is not our wish to live and sleep like animals, but we would be raped if we don’t sleep together at night.”

Sinead Murray, gender-based violence program manager for the International Rescue Committee, says sexual abuse against women has increased dramatically since the number of refugees fleeing the drought in Somalia shot up this year, overwhelming facilities that were already strained to breaking point.

“There are many risk factors, especially on the outskirts,” she says. “Limited access to security, lack of shelter, women’s need to go to bush to collect firewood and also issues of latrines and limited access to basic supplies can lead to exploitation and abuse.”

Steps have been put in place to tackle the problem, but they are having a limited effect.

David Mulwa, a forestry officer, said twelve years ago they started firewood procurement and distribution.

“Firewood procurement and distribution started as a result of increase of rape cases in the late 90s; the project was given to the host community to distribute firewood to the camps,” he says.

However, these kinds of programs only benefit those inside the designated camp areas, and the lack of space means the vulnerable population is growing. International aid agencies cannot provide such services to the likes of Asha and Khadija, since the land they build their structures on belongs to the Kenyan host community.

Murray frequently visits outskirts of the Hagadera camp in an attempt to provide counseling for victims of rape.

“Since the reception center opened, it’s been a good mechanism to facilitate referrals for survivors of sexual violence,” she says. “We have realized we are not capturing enough of them.”

According to Murray, the priority is to reach new arrivals and reduce their vulnerability.

“This week we have been giving dignity kits at the women’s centers – basic materials, sandals, whistles and spotlights so that they can have some protection in the outskirts at night,” she says. “We also trying to draw women together and create support networks, we encourage them to walk in groups when collecting firewood, which some of them have started doing.”

All parties to Somalia’s armed conflict have committed serious violations of the laws of war, thus contributing to the Horn of Africa nation’s humanitarian catastrophe, Human Rights Watch said Monday. Mohammed Yusuf reports.

In a report entitled “You Don’t Know Who to Blame”, the campaigning group accuses militant Islamist group al-Shabaab, the Transitional Federal Government, the African Union peacekeeping mission (known as AMISOM), and pro-government militia trained by Kenya and Ethiopia of abuses.

The report also documents abuses by the Kenyan police against Somali refugees trying to cross the long, porous border between the two nations.

“Abuses by al-Shabaab and pro-government forces have vastly multiplied the suffering from Somalia’s famine,” Neela Ghoshal, a researcher with HRW, said. “All sides need to take urgent steps to stop these unlawful attacks, let in aid, and end this humanitarian nightmare.”

Ghoshal told reporters in the Kenyan capital Nairobi that there is daily repression and unrelenting brutality in areas under al-Shabaab control.

“Harsh punishment – notably flogging and summary executions including public beheadings – are common and meted out against those who violate the militants’ oppressive laws or who are accused of being traitors,” she said.

All sides have unlawfully used artillery in Mogadishu, causing civilian casualties, HRW said, while the TFG has failed to provide security and protection in areas under its control. The group says government-allied militias have also committed serious rights violations, including widespread arbitrary arrest and detention and restrictions on basic human rights.

Government Spokesman Abdirahman Omar Osman said in statement that the government rejected the accusations made against it, and said it was ready to meet HRW officials to discuss the concerns it the group raised at any time. He also criticized HRW for failing to do its research properly.

“Human Rights Watch stated in their report: ‘Reliable figures are hard to come by in Somalia’, which clearly shows that the information they have lacks credibility,” he said. “They are out of touch to the reality on the ground and they do not have offices inside Somalia.

Osman said that al-Shabaab were the real villains of the piece, and pointed out that those fleeing famine had come to government-controlled areas.

With only year left on the TFG’s mandate, Ghoshal said international actors should ensure that clear human rights benchmarks are established and achieved.

“If the TFG does not achieve these basic objectives, other governments and the UN should reconsider their support,” Goshal said.

The group reiterated its call for the establishment of a UN commission of inquiry to investigate violations of human rights and the laws of war by all sides since the beginning of the conflict in Somalia two decades ago and to lay the groundwork for accountability.

However, HRW said that foreign involvement so far had been “counter-productive” and had contributed to problems with security. It said the UN, US and EU have blindly supported the TFG without any effort to press it to curtail abuses.

The UN is to boost its number of staffers based in Mogadishu from 4 to 24 by the end of the year, an official in the UN Political Office for Somalia told Somalia Report.

The United Nations Special Representative for Somalia Augustine Mahiga, in an address to the UN Security Council, said that the UN would begin to relocate its Somalia operations from the Kenyan capital Nairobi in the next four months. Mohammed Yusuf reports.

His statement followed on from the withdrawal of militant Islamist group al-Shabaab from the capital at the weekend.

“We are now actively planning for an expanded UN presence inside Somalia, rather than the ‘light footprint’ we had envisaged,” Mahiga said. “It is thus mission critical that we secure the logistical support, including a fast-tracked construction of permanent facilities to pave the way for the deployment of additional staff in Somalia, particularly in Mogadishu.”

While the UNPOS official said the plans were aiming for 24 staffers, this is not much different from previous figures. A source close to the Somali government last month told Somalia Report that a base was being built at Aden Adde international airport, which would house 20 UN staffers.

Mahiga also called for more support to be given to AMISOM, following on for requests from the force commander for more troops. The force is mandated for 12,000, although only around 9,000 Ugandan and Burundian troops are in place. The African Union had called for 20,000 soldiers.

AMISOM and Mahiga both say that more peacekeepers are crucial to maintain security in the capital amid expanded territory to patrol and more complex tasks. Mahiga said there was s need to create additional guards under the African Union forces’ command to provide protection and facilitate movement for UN staff in Mogadishu.

“I ask the council to seriously consider bringing forward the proposed guard force with the resources that are available and all that it entails in order to ensure that AMISOM can successfully meet these new challenges and adapt to the new reality on the ground in Mogadishu,” he said.

While al-Shabaab has deserted its bases, the group has said it will turn to urban guerrilla tactics, which would mean more ambushes, IEDs and suicide attacks. Any UN base or staff in Mogadishu would be prime targets for such tactics.

Most immediately pressing was the need to secure access for international humanitarian agencies seeking to bring food and supplies for famine victims into the capital, Mahiga said.

Several events concerning Somalia are scheduled to take place in the coming months, including another briefing to the Security Council and a high-level “summit of ministers” to take place on 23 September on the sidelines of the General Assembly. Among other goals, that meeting would aim to sustain international attention on Somalia. It would also seek to reinforce the humanitarian response to the drought, which was likely to persist until the region’s next harvest season, nearly six months away.

Famine conditions in Somalia continue unabated today, as thousands of residents flee to Kenya looking for help. But as the famine ravages the country, the government seems to be making progress towards political stability. Last weekend, the Islamist group al Shabaab made the surprise announcement that it would withdraw from the capital Mogadishu. Today government forces, backed by African Union troops, have been taking control of areas left by the militants. FSRN’s Mohammed Yusuf has that story.

Somalia’s internationally recognized government is in full control of Mogadishu for the first time in five years. Al Shabaab announced a tactical retreat after several days of fighting with government forces.

But Mogadishu is far from safe. Some pockets of al Shabaab fighters north of the city are apparently hiding in private homes and harassing pro-government forces. The insurgents are expected to rely more on urban guerrilla tactics with the use of ambushes and suicide bombers predicted to rise. The African Union is pushing for more troops to stabilize the city, according to spokesperson Paddy Ankunda.

“The area is too big for the soldiers that we have at the moment, for Mogadishu we want additional of three thousand soldiers at least.”

Mogadishu residents say winning over the local population with strong security and good governance will be the key for the government to hold onto the capital. Analysts say the success of the government depends on how it handles its own troops, who have been accused of robbery, killings, and human rights violations. Today, the Somali President said the government would continue to pursue militants outside the capital. Mohammed Yusuf, FSRN.