Pirates of Somalia Read Online Free PDF Page B

produced the Transitional National Government (TNG), an ultimately ineffectual attempt to restore central government to the country from the top down. After the TNG went bankrupt and collapsed, it was replaced in 2004 by the current Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Choosing to view these national reconciliation attempts as legitimate expressions of the will of the Somali people (despite the fact that Somaliland—representing a quarter of the nation’s territory—continued to seek outright independence), the international community threw its backing behind the TFG.
    International support for the central government became further entrenched in 2006, when Ethiopian troops disastrously invaded Somalia in order to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), an Islamist political movement that had wrested control of Mogadishu and much of the south from the TFG and competing warlord factions. The Ethiopian intervention drove ICU’s moderate leadership into exile and sparked a radicalization of the organization, as the ICU’s extremist military wing, Al-Shabaab, splintered from the group and launched a brutal insurgency against the Ethiopian occupiers. The US government had already been wary of the ICU’s Islamist ideology and its potential links to Al Qaeda, and had backed the Ethiopian invasion with air and logistical support; the emergence of Shabaab turned the TFG into a key ally in the war on terror. No longer was the TFG merely the latest phase of a strategically irrelevant country’s struggle with anarchy, but the last bulwark against an Islamist takeover of the Horn of Africa. This perception was reinforced in March 2010, when Al-Shabaab officially declared its affiliation with Al Qaeda, and in July, when Shabaab carried out its first suicide attack outside of Somalia, setting off bombs in two bars in Kampala, Uganda, packed with World Cup revellers.
    Following the overthrow of the ICU, the TFG underwent another transformation. Under pressure from the international community, it merged with the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS), an “opposition party” hastily formed by the self-proclaimed moderate ICU cadres who had fled into exile in Eritrea and Djibouti. The repentant Islamists were accommodated with 275 new seats in the Somali parliament, doubling it to an absurdly bloated 550 members. The leader of the ARS (and former ICU chief), Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, was elected president of the new body. Since 2009, members of Sheikh Sharif’s government have been huddling in their Mogadishu barracks, their daily docket of business more concerned with surviving the continual onslaught of Shabaab militants than administering the country.
    Drawn by YouTube videos, foreign jihadis have come flocking to Somalia from around the world, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Canada, Britain, and the United States (Omar Hammami, known as Abu Mansoor “Al-Amriki,” one of Shabaab’s more notorious online recruiters, is a US citizen born in small-town Alabama). With its suppression of women, glorification of martyrdom, and visions of a global caliphate, Shabaab embraces the kind of Islam the war on terror thrives on. In the areas under its control, the group has banned sports, music, and even bras; those who transgress the group’s strict Salafi interpretation of sharia law face amputation and medieval executions (girls as young as thirteen have been stoned to death for the “crime” of adultery). 2 Shabaab’s radicalism was new to Somalis, who had traditionally practiced a moderate, Sufi-influenced variety of Islam. Up until a generation ago, it was common for women to uncover their heads; these days, the Arab style of dress, with its accompanying headscarf, is virtually ubiquitous.
    In a world dominated by the discourse of the war on terror, various policy analysts, journalists, and politicians pushing particular agendas inevitably began to speculate about pirate cash ending up in the hands of terrorists. One of the