Somalis fear the war against al Shabaab will never end

MOGADISHU, Somalia — They found hands and legs, some blackened bodies, and one business card. Wearing white shirts printed with the phrase “We never get tired of our country,” nearly 200 young Somalis gathered Tuesday at the site of this weekend’s historic terror attack to collect the remains of victims still buried among the rubble.

Mogadishu is no stranger to terrorism: Since al Shabaab lost control of the capital in 2011, the city has experienced a car bomb or an assassination every few weeks. But the attack on Saturday, caused when a truck loaded with explosives detonated beside a fuel tanker in Mogadishu’s bustling Kilometer Five intersection, was unlike anything the city had experienced.

“It’s so painful. It’s unimaginable to see your city like this,” said 29-year-old Muna Hassan, who helped organize the city’s youth response in the aftermath of the attack.

The attack killed 302 people and injured 429 more, according to local ambulance services, making it one of the world’s deadliest terror attacks since 9/11. In recent years, small-scale explosions have been followed by quick cleanups: Debris is removed, blood swept aside, and tables reset for serving tea hours later. But fours days after this one, while emergency personnel struggle to remove bodies from the rubble, Mogadishu’s residents are wondering how the city they thought was on the road to stability could experience such gruesome violence and how the influx of international security support, particularly from the United States, has seemingly done so little.

“The question many people are asking themselves now,” said Abdisalam Yusuf Guled, the former deputy director of Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency,” is whether the government understands the root of this attack, where these people came from, and was this attack preventable.”

Under recently elected President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed’s “stabilization campaign,” launched at the beginning of Ramadan in an attempt to crack down on the flow of arms, the city had enjoyed months of relative stability. Federal authorities limited the number of private armed security personnel in convoys moving through the city and the weapons those personnel could carry; National Intelligence and Security Service agents raided known arms dealers and seized their stocks; and more checkpoints appeared throughout the town.

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The strategy appeared to be working: Ramadan, a month that typically sees a spike in al Shabaab bombings, saw only one major attack and no such attacks in the three months since. But the magnitude of the blast on Saturday calls into question the long-term efficacy of a government seen as prioritizing physical security through force over a long-term comprehensive political solution.

“Mogadishu is a difficult place to secure. There are so many roads — rough roads, alleys — it’s hard to search all vehicles coming into the city for explosives.”

Mogadishu’s residents feel the federal government’s focus on military solutions to the al Shabaab problem has come at the expense of addressing underlying social and economic reasons for the militant group’s continued presence in the country.

Though al Shabaab controls swaths of southern Somalia, a rural and barren desert, the group is only about 3,000 people strong and comprised mainly of young men without job prospects or opportunities. One defector from the group, who asked not to be named for security reasons, told VICE News that many members join simply because they have no other option.

“When al Shabaab won control of my village, someone came to my place to compel me to join,” he said. “They were in control of the area; they took it over like they were making their own Islamic state, so I thought, ‘What choice do I have?’”

Somalia’s local politics, rife with clan rivalries, have also contributed to al Shabaab’s perseverance. When a group successfully captures an area, they often offer tit-for-tat alliances to the clan, agreeing to defend them against rival clans in exchange for peacefully accepting al Shabaab’s presence. As a result, clans have frequently manipulated foreign forces, including the United States, into killing civilians of rival clans by claiming they are members of al Shabaab.

The complexities of Somalia’s counterterrorism battle came to the forefront of U.S. foreign policy in March, when the Trump administration designated parts of Somalia an “area of active hostilities,” offering less oversight of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) to carry out drone strikes and ground operations. With the easing of these regulations, many human rights observers feared an increase in civilian casualties, and in August those fears were realized when U.S. troops were involved in a ground operation that killed 10 civilians, including three children, in the Bariire area of southern Somalia. According to a report from the Guardian, at least one of Saturday’s bombers was from Bariire.

Though AFRICOM has opened an investigation into the incident in Bariire, they show no sign of slowing down their increasingly close partnership with Somalia’s federal government. On Monday, the Pentagon confirmed the presence of 400 U.S. troops in Somalia, an eightfold increase from this time last year. Whether the increased number of troops can help President Mohamed’s new government successfully smother an insurgency remains to be seen.

For now, Somalis in the capital will continue to mourn their neighbors lost in Saturday’s devastating attack. “You cannot describe what has happened here,” said Hassan. “We will be praying together tomorrow, and we will see where our country can go from here.”

Christina Goldbaum is an independent journalist and producer based in Mogadishu.