مقتل «عيرو» وتداعياته على الصراع الصومالي

The Killing of “Ayro” and Its Repercussions for the Somali Conflict

Image: The town of El Dher in the Galgaduud region, central Somalia. Ayanl3, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Image page

This article was published on the old Nuqush website (nuqush.com) on 5 May 2008.

On 1 May 2008 the Pentagon jubilantly announced the killing of the young leader Aden Hashi Ayro¹, head of Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen², the movement resisting the Ethiopian occupation. US warplanes had carried out an air strike, dropping three large bombs on a small house in a rural village in southern Somalia known as Dhusamareb, in the Galgaduud region, 500 kilometres north of the capital, Mogadishu.

At the time, a group of young men was sheltering in the village, among them the targeted leader and one of the movement's scholar-ideologues. It was about two o'clock in the morning on Wednesday 30 April 2008.

American warplanes have made a habit of bombing civilians in Somalia, on the pretext of targeting terrorists, ever since Ethiopian forces entered Somalia in December 2006³. They came to support the so-called Transitional Government, which Ethiopia used as a pretext and a cover for its direct occupation of Somalia, and to drive the forces of the Islamic Courts out of Mogadishu, after the Courts had routed the US-backed warlords and taken control of the southern regions, bringing back the security and safety that the people had lost in sixteen years of civil war and chaos.

This is at least the fourth officially acknowledged time that the United States has bombed rural areas⁴, but it is the only time it has managed to hit its target, killing the man believed to be the leader of al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, along with as many as thirty civilians, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to the media.

As a rule, the toll of American air raids in Somalia is civilians, herdsmen and their livestock.

The Killing of Ayro: Victory or Failure?

America will find that the efforts it is making with its allies in the region, especially the Ethiopians and the so-called Transitional Government, are bearing fruit. That is why the Pentagon spokesman, in his statement, called Ayro's killing a victory over terrorism, though the word has lost its linguistic meaning through American usage, having become a garment in which the Americans dress anyone who opposes their policies.

What matters to analysts and to those who follow the region's affairs and the raging conflict in Somalia, however, is the repercussions of this incident: the effect of the al-Shabaab leader's killing, first on the future of his movement, and then on the slow train of talks that was expected to set off, under UN mediation, between the Transitional Government and the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia⁵. The Alliance was formed in September last year and is led by the mainstream of the resistance to the Ethiopian occupation.

Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen came into the open and became the talk of the media after the Ethiopian occupation of Somalia. Although it is faulted for a hard-line discourse that has come to run parallel to al-Qaeda's, it has not declared itself part of al-Qaeda, nor have al-Qaeda's well-known leaders adopted it or given it that status.

All that its accusers have that could count as evidence is that some of its young leaders fought in the Afghan war or trained in Afghanistan, and there is no evidence that they met bin Laden or any other al-Qaeda leader.

Yet Western think tanks and media regarded it as al-Qaeda's wing in the Horn of Africa, and the United States put it on its list of terrorist organisations². But its targets have not gone beyond Somali soil, the Ethiopian occupation and those who collaborate with it; it has never attacked American targets, nor declared any intention to do so.

We are not defending here the movement's hard-line and extremist vision, for which many fair-minded people criticise it, even within the Islamic movement in Somalia: above all its unrealistic and unbalanced discourse, the wide licence it gives itself to kill civilians and non-combatants, and its branding as a collaborator anyone who deals with the collaborationist government. All this points to its failure to grasp the jurisprudence of reality and the jurisprudence of priorities⁶, and to its rejection of dialogue in principle.

Our problem here, though, is with the Western, American understanding and outlook, which usually assumes that killing and death work against extremists and hard-liners and stop them from carrying on their resistance. The extremists, by contrast, see themselves as waging jihad, so that death in the path of God is the highest of their hopes. With death comes success, and the supreme goal: martyrdom, which every Muslim asks God, night and day, to grant him.

The ideology of martyrdom is what drives al-Shabaab's fighters in Somalia and many of those who seek martyrdom in other parts of the world. They believe that the blood of the martyr is what nourishes and inspires the coming generations of fighters. But they do not believe that God, just as He has commanded us to die for Islam, has also commanded us to live for Islam.

Here lies the dilemma that breeds action, reaction and violence: on one side, an unjust state terrorism that tries to spread its liberal ideology and impose democracy through terror and killing; on the other, those who do not stop at resisting it, which is a legitimate act, but go further, seeking to impose their own understanding of Islam, allowing themselves to kill people on mere suspicion and paying no heed to the killing of civilians when they mingle with the enemy.

Both sides impose their vision and ideology through violence and brute force, and so they commit atrocities and savage acts that human nature itself refuses to accept.

Reason and the voice of logic and wisdom are the victims. Because they wield violence, force and oppression, whatever the scale and degree of each side's force and violence, their voice is the loudest and the one that is heard, while the voices of the weak, who want to argue with wisdom, are faint and are trampled under the hooves of their horsemen and the feet of their foot soldiers⁷.

In this sense, the death of al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen's leader, “Ayro”, will be no more than a sign that the confrontation goes on, a senseless and irrational war; it cannot be counted a victory or a defeat for either side.

The Killing of Ayro: An Added Asset for the Movement

Yet by the logic of strength and weakness, of the arrogant and the downtrodden⁸, for a superpower that controls the world to strike a small movement and a group of young men in a remote village with all this force and violence is, even if it achieved its aim, an implicit sign of impotence. Indeed, it gives the group a momentum that spurs it to carry on along its path.

It also helps to lend legitimacy to the movement's existence by keeping its cause alive, a cause that inspires and recruits more young men to join it, to win one of the two best outcomes⁹: victory, with heavy slaughter of the enemy and his defeat, or martyrdom.

There is no doubt that the death of the movement's leader will make people believe that al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen is the true resistance against the Ethiopian enemy, which, as many Somalis see it, is targeting the national and religious identity of the Somali people, and that this is why the United States has made it a target. The movement can then claim that it is on the right path, unlike those who want to strike a deal with the government that represents the enemy.

The movement is likely to exploit this to claim the legitimacy of leading the resistance, and even to use it as a pretext to accuse the Alliance leadership in Asmara of joining hands with the killers of the movement's leader. The movement had opposed any dialogue with the so-called Transitional Government, and its leader has fulfilled his vow¹⁰ and offered up his life for what he believed in, while the other leadership spends its time travelling between capitals or in the hotels of Asmara, as supporters of al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen describe it. The movement refused to come under the Alliance's leadership and has declared its rejection of any talks with the Transitional Government.

It is true that al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen is likely to try to wreck any agreement the Alliance makes with the government, and that it may stand in the way of reaching or implementing any agreement between the so-called Transitional Government and the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia.

Most Somalis, however, firmly believe that the power and influence of al-Shabaab are greatly exaggerated, inflated by the Western media on the one hand and by the Ethiopians and the Transitional Government on the other, to justify the brutality of the atrocities they commit on the claim that they are fighting al-Qaeda and the movement that represents it in Somalia. They use this as cover for their criminal acts against civilians, since hunting terrorists has become internationally acceptable.

Somali observers close to the resistance believe that al-Shabaab has been given more importance than its real size warrants: although its members are very few and its vision unpopular, its voice is louder, and it claims to carry out major operations.

The attention paid to it by the media, by the Transitional Government and by the Ethiopian occupation, both backed by the United States, seems to give it the chance to recruit more young men.

The truth is that al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen gains and draws its legitimacy from the presence of the occupation and the crimes it commits, and from the continual violation of human rights by its forces, as happened last week in Mogadishu, when Ethiopian troops slaughtered thirty religious scholars belonging to a peaceful group that does not concern itself with politics, the Tablighi Jamaat, in the al-Hidaya Mosque in the Wardhigley district of the capital¹¹, and when they killed and abducted schoolchildren.

Al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen also draws its legitimacy, naturally, from the American air raids that kill civilians with unprecedented brutality.

Ayro's Killing Hinders Dialogue

As for the effect of this incident on the expected dialogue, this operation will certainly hold back the Alliance leadership from going ahead with what it has begun, especially since even within the Alliance there are those who believe this dialogue is futile while civilians are still targeted like this and America keeps bombing Somali soil, and bombing leaders who, whatever their positions, are fighting the Ethiopian enemy.

Nor will the leadership there be happy to be portrayed as a beneficiary of the young leader Ayro's death. It is likely to refuse to take part in the proposed dialogue between it and the government, or at least to postpone it indefinitely and to set conditions ensuring that such incidents are not repeated.

Many Somalis, clan elders among them, had been trying to bring al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen into the negotiating process, and Prime Minister Nur Adde¹² had declared himself ready for this, so that the movement would not wreck whatever agreement the Transitional Government and the Alliance might reach.

Expectations were optimistic before Ayro's killing, but it will now be hard to persuade the movement to accept such a step, because it will be expected to avenge its leader.

In short, Ayro's killing will escalate the situation and complicate the Somali crisis further; matters may slip out of control and become hard to handle.

What the United States ought to understand is that these young men, hard-liners, extremists or terrorists, whatever it pleases to call them, can be contained only by drawing them into life, not by exclusion and harshness.

Only Somalis themselves can deal with their situation. And unless the root problem, the illegitimate Ethiopian occupation, is removed, the al-Shabaab question cannot be contained.

Otherwise the movement will gain more legitimacy and grow more radical and extreme over time, so long as the root cause of its emergence has not been properly dealt with.

English translation prepared by artificial intelligence and reviewed against the Arabic for accuracy of meaning and rhetoric.