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ABOUT THE SERIES
As 2008 dawns, Globe and Mail correspondents around the world examine international issues set to make news in the new year. Today's story is the fourth of five.
Never, Ahmed Abdisalam Adan says, has it been this bad.
The Somali journalist, who built a new life in Canada before moving back to start an independent media house in Mogadishu eight years ago, knows whereof he speaks: He lived through some of the worst of Somalia's civil war, and through the strange anarchic years that followed, when a country without a government somehow lurched along.
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Now, however, Mr. Adan is living in Nairobi, afraid to go to the Somali capital after his partner and a reporter for his HornAfrik Media were assassinated in August.
"It's never been at this level," Mr. Adan said about the fighting in Mogadishu and the instability across the country. "It's no longer Somalis fighting, clans fighting. It's a regional conflict, an international conflict."
While Somalia is, it seems, perpetually in the news, the last year has seen an unprecedented escalation in the conflict, and 2008 looks set to be even worse, as the humanitarian crisis worsens and more regional actors get dragged into the fighting. Yet few of these developments have won notice in the West, accustomed as it is to the same old bad news out of Somalia.
Mr. Adan's views are echoed by many other observers: "We're not talking here about different clan militias waging war; we're talking about a complex political dynamic that has a lot of interest for the West in terms of counterterrorism efforts," said Leslie Lefkow, who monitors Somalia for Human Rights Watch.
The country's current troubles began in 2004, when a long-negotiated peace deal produced a transitional government made up largely of warlords. But other chieftains ruling patches of Somalia refused to accept its authority and President Abdullahi Yusuf never made it to the capital.
Before long, the new government's lack of legitimacy and support were apparent, and a new power arose in the vacuum. In June, 2006, an organization calling itself the Islamic Courts seized control of the capital and then much of the rest of southern Somalia. Its leaders imposed sharia, or strict Islamic law, but Somalis were delighted with the peace and stability they brought; for the first time in more than a decade, people walked Mogadishu's streets without fear.
But the Islamic rulers threatened (perhaps with serious intent but dubious ability to implement) jihad against neighbouring Ethiopia, a historic enemy that was continually sending troops over the border and denying it.
So Ethiopia took action a year ago on Christmas Eve, when the developed world was paying even less attention than usual, and invaded, saying it acted to install the "rightful" transitional government of President Yusuf in Mogadishu. The Ethiopians used the fashionable language of rooting out terrorism, and quickly got support from their ally the United States, which provided missile attacks to back up the invasion.
The Ethiopians said they would stay only long enough to install President Yusuf and hand over to an African peacekeeping force. But a year later, the Ethiopian forces are still there, routinely shelling residential neighbourhoods of Mogadishu while the Islamists wage an "Iraq style" insurgency of suicide bombings and assassinations of civil-society leaders and journalists such as those from HornAfrik.
The conflict has killed at least 6,501 civilians in the capital Mogadishu in 2007 and wounded 8,516 more, according to a count released yesterday by the Elman Peace and Human Rights Organization, a local group. The latest victims were eight members of a single family killed Sunday by a mortar fired during fighting between Somali insurgents and Ethiopian troops at a refugee camp north of Mogadishu.
"The core problem was that Somalis everywhere were appalled to see Ethiopian troops on the streets of their capital," Sally Healy, an expert on the Horn of Africa with the English international affairs think tank Chatham House, wrote recently in Johannesburg's Mail and Guardian.
