Farmaajo: We Have No One Else to Blame
No amount of outside firepower has brought the country to heel. Not thousands of American Marines in the early 1990s. Not the enormous United Nations mission that followed. Not the Ethiopian Army storming into Somalia in 2006. Not the current African Union peacekeepers, who are steadily wearing out their welcome.
The only time Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, was remotely quiet in recent times was for six months in 2006, when an Islamist coalition controlled the city by itself. Today, the most stable part of the country is the breakaway region of Somaliland, which recently held elections and carried out one of the Horn of Africa’s rare peaceful transfers of power, despite little help and a lack of official recognition from the outside world.
Somalia continues to be a caldron of bloodshed, piracy and Islamist radicalism. That volatile mix has spilled over its borders in recent years, but perhaps most intensely in July 2010, when bombings in Kampala, Uganda killed more than 70 civilians and shocked the entire country.
Somali Islamist insurgents — egged on, or possibly aided, by Al Qaeda — claimed responsibility for the attack. There are currently 6,000 Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers in Mogadishu, but they are struggling to beat back the Islamist fighters, who are rallying around a group called the Shabab.
Somalia’s transitional government, initially considered to be the country
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