Somali Democratic Republic

June 15, 2011 | World Defense Review

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....

June 14, 2011 | World Defense Review

The War on Terrorism in Africa: Assessment and Prospects

The end of one year and the beginning of another is a good time both to take stock of where we have been and to look ahead at the paths we are likely to take and the battles which we will have to...

June 14, 2011 | World Defense Review

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...

February 24, 2011 | World Defense Review

Somali Piracy Hits America: Some Questions in Need of Answers

The murder earlier this week by their captors of four United States citizens aboard the SV Quest, a yacht hijacked last Friday off the coast of Oman, brought home to America the increasing toll o...

February 1, 2011 | J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

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...

October 18, 2010 | World Defense Review

Somalia’s New Prime Minister: Not Quite What the Doctor Ordered

Just when it seems things can get no worse for Somalia's dubiously legitimate, utterly ineffective, and wholly self-serving "Transitional Federal Government" (TFG), the embattled clique pull...

May 27, 2010 | J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Ballots and Bullets: The Tale of the Two Somalias

Last week, Somalis marked the fiftieth anniversary of their achievement of independence from colonial rule. The contrasting manner in which two parts of the onetime Somali Democratic Republic obs...

October 15, 2009 | World Defense Review

Eritrea: Spoiler Exacerbates Crisis in the Horn of Africa and Beyond

By Dr. J. Peter Pham One of the frustrations with which Africa's friends have had to repeatedly cope over the years has been the seemingly utter incapacity of the African l...

September 24, 2009 | World Defense Review

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...

September 17, 2009 | World Defense Review

Somali Instability Still Poses Threat Even After Successful Strike on Nabhan

By Dr. J. Walid Phares The United States struck an important blow against Islamist terrorism in the Horn of Africa earlier this week when, in the middle of the day on Monday, Sp...

September 29, 2008 | New Atlanticist

The Challenge of Somali Piracy

By Dr. J. Peter Pham In a metaphor that the traditionally nomadic Somalis would undoubtedly appreciate, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Last Thursday, Somali pirates...

May 1, 2008 |

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.

July 25, 2007 | Dr. J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

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...

May 23, 2007 | Dr. J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Smokin’ on Somalia

Last week, my colleague at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), Andrew McCarthy; the former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York who led the pros...

April 11, 2007 | Dr. J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

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...

March 28, 2007 | Dr. J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Salvaging Security in Somalia

Two weeks ago in this space, I reported that the supporters of Somalia's defeated Islamic Courts Union (ICU) were reconstituting themselves as the "Popular Resistance Movement in the Land of...

January 24, 2007 | Dr. J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Coping with Humpty Dumpty

As I get older, I have increasingly come to appreciate the wisdom that we learn in from our elders in the early years of our earthly lives. Some of those lessons are imparted explicitly in the so...

January 17, 2007 | Dr. J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

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...

January 8, 2007 |

Strikes in Somalia

On Sunday, a United States Air Force AC-130 gunship launched a strike against what Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman on Tuesday called “principal al-Qaeda leadership” operating in sout...

January 4, 2007 | World Defense Review

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...