Somalia: On Scene in Baidoa After Ethiopia's Rout of Al-Shabab

Mar 12, 2012

People in Somalia’s third-largest city are so glad the radical Islamist group is gone, they don’t even mind being occupied—yet.

The previous occupants of the crumbling palace left its interior covered with multicolored chalk drawings and painted graffiti. The childishly rendered pictures give the place a kind of schoolroom look. That is, except for the subject matter: AK-47s and tanks spewing bullets and flames; exploding airplanes; cellphones, complete with painstakingly detailed buttons, the detonators of choice for the roadside bombs that are used by the Islamist radicals of Al-Shabab. Guiding us through Somalia’s onetime presidential palace in Baidoa, Capt. Mahamoud Yissak seems almost regretful for the fighters, who mostly fled when the Ethiopian Army captured the city. “They’re only teenagers,” the Ethiopian officer says. “They think only about jihad.”

The building now serves as a command center for the Ethiopians, who insist they have no intention of staying in Somalia. All they want to do, they say, is to eradicate Al-Shabab, the Islamist threat on their eastern border, and enable Somalia to create its first stable central government in more than 20 years. “It’s an issue of national security,” says an Ethiopian diplomat. “Once we get a responsible government, we leave.” The hope is that Baidoa is a big step in that direction. The strategic city, midway between the Ethiopian border and Mogadishu, was under Al-Shabab’s control for three years until the Ethiopians finally drove the militants out on Feb. 22. It was the al Qaeda–linked group’s biggest loss since it pulled out of the Somali capital last August. This month a reporter and photographer for Newsweek were among the first Western journalists in years to visit Baidoa, embedded with the Ethiopian Army.

Evidence of the militants’ hasty retreat from the city is hard to miss. In an overgrown compound just outside the once-lavish entryway of the command center’s main building, a collection of captured weaponry is on display: munitions canisters, mortars, and IEDs, together with an abundance of components for assembling more roadside bombs—switches, detonators, wire, and motorcycle batteries. In another compound nearby there’s an abandoned fleet of “technicals,” the country’s emblematic pickup trucks equipped with gun mounts. In case anyone fails to grasp the Islamists’ threat, Ethiopian military officials routinely refer to Al-Shabab simply as al Qaeda.

Ethiopian Troops Free Baidoa, Somalia, of Terrorist Rule (Photos)

Ethiopian tanks and troops stand guard at the city’s airport. View photos from Somalia. ,
Pete Muller for Newsweek

This isn’t Ethiopia’s first foray into Baidoa. In early 2007, Ethiopian soldiers wrested control of the city from armed factions of the Islamic Courts Union and imposed enough security for Somalia’s pro-Western Transitional Federal Government (TFG) to adopt the town as its provisional capital. Mogadishu, the regular capital, was too dangerous back then. But the would-be national leaders never settled into their temporary home, and the interim government’s institutions never took hold—Parliament had to convene in a converted grain warehouse. “Throughout much of 2008, when [the Ethiopians] controlled the city, that control was contested, and they were not very competent,” says Rashid Abdi, an independent Somalia analyst previously affiliated with the International Crisis Group. “The reality was that they controlled the city without local consent, and many people were happy to see them go.”

Most international analysts conclude that Ethiopia’s 2006–09 Somalia intervention was a failure. It’s true that the Ethiopian Army accomplished the mission it was sent to perform: remove the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) from power in Somalia’s southern half. Western governments had worried, the Americans most stridently, that the ICU’s hardline Islamists would allow international terrorists to use the country as a training ground and basing area for global jihad. Nevertheless, the Ethiopian presence ultimately backfired: the defunct ICU gave birth to an even more extremist group, Al-Shabab, which used the “occupation” as a rallying issue to mobilize fighters and whip up Somali public opinion with the group’s fiercely nationalistic, anti-Western rhetoric.

Many Somalis bought it at first. “There was a feeling that Al-Shabab itself—and the faction of Al-Shabab that controlled [Baidoa]—was more in tune with the local clan feelings, with people’s aspirations and interests,” says Abdi. In particular he attributes the militants’ initial popularity to Sheik Muktar Robow, one of the group’s four top leaders. Robow is a native of the region around Baidoa and largely controls it now, and according to Abdi he’s “much more pragmatic” than other Al-Shabab leaders in his willingness to form alliances with local clans.

But Somali opinion was swayed by more than what Abdi calls Al-Shabab’s “softer face.” The Ethiopian soldiers were widely accused of indiscriminate bombardments, rape, and looting. Today that reputation precedes the country’s troops. “Given Ethiopia’s track record in Somalia, and notably the complete impunity granted to its forces in the past, their formal return on Somali soil raises significant concerns,” says Leslie Lefkow, deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “We have received allegations of abuses around Beledweyne”—a border town that fell to the Ethiopians in late December—“and are investigating.”

Source : http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/03/11/somalia-on-scene-in-baidoa-after-ethiopia-s-rout-of-al-shabab.html