Reading the statistics of terrorist attacks in the world, it is to be noted that more than seventy percent of the events (about ten thousand a year, and increasing) occurs in South-eastern Asia and the Middle East. Highly unstable Afghanistan and Pakistan (and India, albeit claims are more “social”) and Iraq and Persian Gulf countries account for such a high figure. At the southernmost limit of this area lies the Horn of Africa, which is adversely affected.
The region is also affected by the persistence of old and diverse sources of extremism in Equatorial sub-Saharan Africa, where a wide array of diversified phenomena is to be found, ranging from Equatorial Guinea to Niger, northern Chad, the south-west of Sudan and the inner regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The threats here rooted affect the Great Lakes region in Africa: Uganda and Kenya, locked in a deadly grip by the parallel menaces coming from East Africa and which found – in the attacks in Kampala on July, 11th, a shocking and immediate visibility. The Horn of Africa is hence merely the tip of a submerged, frightening and extremely difficult to avoid iceberg. Sources of risk are ineradicable in the short term (six to twelve months).
For this to be possible within a longer time frame (the next two to five years) it is necessary to seek solutions to regional problems in the broader context of continental and international scenario while – in parallel – not letting these considerations be an obstacle in understanding the reasons behind local political and military leaders reasoning, while keeping in mind the strategic developments and operational trends. The first fact to grasp is fragmentation.
In Somalia one notes the extreme ineffectiveness of the Transitional Federal Government – more than five years after its birth – even in setting however small technical standards for collaboration, needed to create the armed forces to conduct the fight against extremists. These are themselves deeply divided, as evidenced by defections among factions, most often to gain localized or personalized benefits. The situation is better in the northern regions of Puntland and Somaliland and in Ethiopia, where recent elections were a test of stability that has ended positively.
A second fact is the simultaneous presence of networks of piracy and recruitment of international terrorism. The focus of the threat is in particular on the transit of foreign jihadists or the return in these areas of Somali expatriates that have guerrilla experience abroad. These are the most dangerous cases, but it is difficult to establish a link between the two realities. These seem to represent distinct sources of threat: increasingly, boats that have fallen victims of piracy head to Harardheere (Mudug, in central Somalia, Islam conquered by Hizbul in May) rather than to southern ports, confirming that the two networks are not merging.
The pirates have commenced (from February to March 2010) to attack Somali ships, which had not represented an objective of their actions so far: this has led towards a further separation between the bands of pirates and those related to Al-Shabaab. The core of pirate actions is moved back out to deep water seas – towards India, north to the Gulf of Aden and up beyond the Bab el-Mandeb strait (in mid-July 2010). Eritrea has not yet played an active role either in stopping or in supporting such activities and its enhanced role would be desirable: it is likely that Chinese partners, that are researching bases in the area, will take advantage of this situation.
The networks in Somalia still rely on direct confrontation tactics, often conducted with ambushes and short-range weapons (over 50% of cases, the last one recorded on August, 15th in the Taleh and Taribunka districts of Mogadishu); less common are attacks carried out with explosives, or which involve hostage-taking or targeted killings. To date, cross-border incursions have been limited to northern Kenya and the very attacks in Kampala might have been the result of local Ugandan structures that adhere – either consciously or unconsciously – to a design that is trans-national in the mind of followers, but that currently does not seem to be supported by adequate funding nor logistical facilities, which should expand the geographical scope of extremism in the Horn. Similar networks in Ethiopia have limited themselves to moderate scale events indeed: they too do not seem to get past the purely local dimension that inspires their actions.
Funding for these groups – as well as for jihadist inspired movements in Somalia – is still largely tied to “prey” and taxation (extortion) of businesses that insist on the territories they control. As a third source of income we can identify the protection of international food aid routes.
In our view, the need for tight territorial control and substantial supine acceptance of people living in the area constitute two weaknesses in the medium term, which can be exploited to reduce the overall size of the threat, provided that the reduction of insecurity is accompanied by a tight commitment to social and economic interventions in a wider sense. Those have proven effective elsewhere in the world – even in those areas that are epicentres of international instability.
