Around the Troubled Horn
Even by the much-reduced expectations of the subregion, the news emanating from the geopolitically-sensitive, but ever-volatile Horn of Africa has not been at all good these last few weeks....
Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed
Somalia Still Sinking as Eritrea Entertains Enemies
September has not been a good month in the sometime Somali capital of Mogadishu, even by the relative standards of a failed state that has not had an effective central government in the sixteen y...
Op-eds
Somalia in Need of New Approach Two Decades after State Collapse
Last week marked the twentieth anniversary of the night when Mohamed Siyad Barre, president of the last entity that could plausibly be described as the government of Somalia, fled Mogadishu in hi...
Op-eds
The Strategic Challenge of Somalia’s Al-Shabaab
Since emerging from an era of colonialism under Italy and Britain, Somalia has passed through military dictatorship, famine, and civil war to regional fragmentation. In the modern period, America...
Op-eds
Putting Puntland’s Potential into Play
By Dr. J. Peter Pham In last week's column, I noted that the United States military and intelligence communitie...
Op-eds
Bin Laden’s Somali Gambit
Last week, al-Qaeda chieftain Usama bin Laden interjected himself yet once again into the ongoing conflict in the territory of the former Somali Democratic Republic. On closer examination, the mo...
Op-eds
The Chinese Navy’s Somali Cruise
by Dr. Peter Pham Since the beginning of January, three vessels of China's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) - the Guangzhou-class destroyer Wuhan...
Op-eds
Pirates of Somalia: The Curse of the Failed State
On April 4, MY Le Ponant, an 850-ton three-masted luxury sailing yacht owned by CMA CGM S.A., a French firm headed by Lebanese-born businessman Jacques Saadé that is the third-largest container shipping company in the world, was en route from the Seychelles to the Mediterranean when it was seized in international waters in the Gulf of Aden by Somali pirates. A week later, after the owners had paid a ransom reported to be around $2 million, Le Ponant docked at the port of Eyl in the semi-autonomous northeastern region of Puntland and the 30 crew members – twenty-two Frenchmen, six Filipinos, a Cameroonian, and a Ukrainian – were released. French forces, however, tracked the attackers to the nearby fishing village of Jariban where helicopter-borne commandos disabled the escape vehicle with sniper fire and seized six of what is thought to have been an original band of twelve fugitives. The six prisoners were flown to Paris where they were arraigned before a French court on charges of theft, hijacking, and hostage-taking.
Op-eds
Why AFRICOM is Critical for Our Security Interests
This week I thought it useful to update readers on developments with some of the stories that have been previously reported in this column.
Op-eds
China’s Play for Somalia’s Oil
As this column has chronicled over the past year and a half, United States policy toward the remnants of the former state of Somalia has evolved into a sort of dramatic farce played out in the fo...
Op-eds
Mired in Mogadishu
Two weeks ago a "national reconciliation congress" that Somalia's ineffectual "Transitional Federal Government" (TFG), under pressure from international donors who are its only means of supp...
Op-eds
Jihad’s New Leaders
The recent deaths of prominent Al-Qaeda terrorists such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq and Abu Hafs al-Urdani in Daghestan, as well as a host of less publicized kills and captures, have hastened...
Op-eds
Peacekeepers with No Peace to Keep
Somewhere along the crooked path that runs from the collapse of the Soviet Union that signaled the emergence of the United States as the world's lone superpower to the seemingly intractable...
Op-eds
Smoldering in Somalia
More than three months after the United Nations Security Council first authorized an international contingent to go into the territory of the onetime Somali Democratic Republic to keep a nonexist...
Op-eds
Somalia May Save the War on Terrorism
In my last column in this series, I argued that while “Ethiopia may not have been the ideal intervener in Somalia, better it than no one and perhaps the one thing worse than Ethiopia interv...
Op-eds
Resurrecting Somalia
As of this week, the United States is directly engaged in Somalia, Ethiopian forces are successfully advancing and Al-Qaeda and Islamic Courts Union (ICU) fighters have been effectively cornered-...
Op-eds
Sweeping Up in Somalia
The reports continue to stream in of the hasty retreat of the militants of Somalia's Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in the face of an unexpectedly heavy offensive by Ethiopian air and land force...
Op-eds
In Somalia, An Africa Hawk Rises
With most Westerners in the throes of holiday mirth this week, an estimated 20,000 Ethiopian troops deployed to neighboring Somalia went on the offensive against the forces of the Islamic Courts...
Op-eds
Update: Islamist Radicals Still on the March in Somalia
While recent crises in other parts of the world have pushed them even farther from the headlines, the Islamist radicals who took control of the sometime Somali capital of Mogadishu in early June...
Op-eds
America’s Somali Policy Still Dangerously Adrift
This column is dedicated to the premise that the strategic neglect of Africa was the weak link in the advancement of American foreign policy interests in general, and the successful prosecution o...