By David Axe, World Politics Review
On a morning late last November in Mogadishu, Somalia, a tall, toothy 65-year-old man climbed into his beat-up sedan parked in the makeshift squatter’s camp he called home. Ali Mohamed Siyad, chairman of the central Bakara Market — once the economic engine of Mogadishu, but now a mostly ruined battleground — motored across town to my hotel for an interview.
Passing the accumulated debris of years of warfare, Siyad — know to his friends as “Ali Dere” (“Tall Ali”) — perhaps reflected on how far he’d fallen.
Ali Dere would never use the word to describe himself, but for several years beginning in the 1990s, he was one of the city’s powerful warlords, driven into the position by the looting that wracked Mogadishu in the wake of the 1991 civil war. With an arsenal of nearly 2,000 assault rifles, readily available on the black market, Ali Dere raised a security force big enough to patrol all of Bakara Market. To pay his troops, he imposed a small tax on businesses. Soon he had the armed force necessary to ward off looters. For a while, Bakara — indeed, much of Mogadishu — was safe, as warlords established a stable balance of power.
Contrast that to today. Mortar duels between Islamic insurgents and African Union peacekeepers in the last week have killed scores of civilians in Mogadishu. Attacks have shut down the international airport for the first time in years. Two foreign journalists and their Somali colleague were abducted at gunpoint in August and reportedly are being held somewhere in Bakara. Last weekend more than 100,000 refugees choked the roads heading out of town.
In just the last few weeks, Mogadishu, one of the world’s most desperate cities in one of the world’s most desperate countries, has somehow managed to become even more dangerous.
It wasn’t always like this. Two years ago, Mogadishu, and much of Somalia, were under the strict but fairly orderly rule of the Union of Islamic Courts, in alliance with a number of warlords, including Ali Dere. After years of financial drought, foreign investment poured in.
Then in 2006, a confederation of northern clans calling itself the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) teamed up with the Ethiopian Woyanne army and, with significant U.S. backing, destroyed the Islamic Courts in Mogadishu, disarmed the warlords and sparked the present insurgency. In Somalia, as in Iraq, the logic of waging war on any political movement that remotely resembles Islamic extremism has resulted in greater extremism.
But it didn’t have to be this way. A more reasonable U.S. strategy in such places would be to engage hardline regimes. The alternative — chaos — is far worse.
In Mogadishu, the consequences of Washington’s refusal to engage with admittedly unsavory local and regional leaders are manifest in Ali Dere’s tragic fall.
His power, and his association with the Islamic Courts, made him a target of the U.S.- and Ethiopian Woyanne-backed TFG. When Mogadishu fell to the TFG and Ethiopians Woyanne in early 2007, Ali Dere was ordered to surrender his arms. He did so, but suspicions lingered that he was sympathetic to the Islamic Courts and the associated Al-Shabab insurgent group. The suspicions were exacerbated by Ali Dere’s vocal opposition to ongoing U.S. military strikes on suspected Islamists in Somalia. (The strikes reportedly have resulted in many civilian casualties.) “I know I might be arrested,” Ali Dere said when he reached my hotel that day last November, “but I don’t care.”
Sure enough, just a month after leaving Somalia the following December, I got an email saying Ali Dere had been arrested by government troops. I expected never to hear from him again. The transitional government’s “justice” system doesn’t dole out much justice, just torture and — if you believe the rumors — summary execution.
Had Ali Dere died, it would have been the logical result of outsiders’ illogical decision to remove the only powers capable of maintaining order in a troubled city. Mogadishu’s warlords had, alongside the Islamic Courts, enforced a measure of security that facilitated investment and commerce. Granted, it was security at the cost of democracy, along with many other liberties that Westerners take for granted. Cinemas, for example, were banned. But that was a small price to pay for peace.
In fact, though, Ali Dere survived. He reappeared in Mogadishu after a few weeks, explaining his arrest as a simple misunderstanding over property ownership. But I for one was skeptical. His detention coincided with reports that the TFG and Ethiopia Woyanne were trying to clear out insurgents and their sponsors from their Bakara hideouts. And in a follow-up interview, the former Bakara warlord seemed a shadow of his former self. Which led me to believe that Ali Dere was squeezed for information.
Regardless, the TFG’s and Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s Bakara offensive was a failure, and today Mogadishu is more violent than ever. The anti-Islamist, anti-warlord strategy in Somalia has failed, and similar approaches elsewhere in the so-called “war on terror” will also fail, as long as Washington prioritizes ideology over security in troubled countries.
To craft lasting peace, we must engage regional regimes and even local strongmen who might offend our Western sensibilities, but who are capable of enforcing a measure of law and order.
We could start by giving Ali Dere back his guns.
(David Axe is an independent correspondent, a World Politics Review contributing editor, and the author of “War Bots: How U.S. Military Robots Are Transforming War in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Future.” His new column for WPR, “War is Boring,” will appear every two weeks.)