Although most Somalis did not support the jihadist agenda of the hardliners, and few wanted another war with Ethiopia—which still claimed one of the largest, most sophisticated armies in sub-Saharan Africa—the presence of Ethiopian troops in Baidoa and persistent Ethiopian incursions across Somalia’s borders rallied the population behind the radicals. Moderates in the ICU, who previously had discussed elections and power sharing, also began talking war. Departing from his earlier position, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys urged Somalis to prepare for jihad against Ethiopia. In late July and early August 2006, some forty senior government officials, including a number of cabinet ministers, abandoned the TFG. Some defected to the ICU, taking their own militias with them.
The fallout from foreign intervention rapidly transformed the Somali conflict into a regional conflagration. In October, the UN reported that ten nations were supplying arms to various Somali factions in violation of the UN embargo. Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria were supporting the ICU, while Ethiopia, Uganda, and Yemen were furnishing weapons to the TFG. In November, as ICU militias routed TFG forces in the north, President Yusuf appealed for further external assistance. The United States responded, pushing through a UN Security Council resolution on December 6, 2006, that described the Somali situation as “a threat to international peace and security in the region” and authorized the AU and IGAD to establish a military force to protect the TFG and to train its security forces.19 The resolution also created a loophole in the UN arms embargo that allowed the African peacekeeping forces—and implicitly, Ethiopian soldiers protecting the TFG—to be supplied with weapons, while continuing to deny arms to the ICU.
On December 14, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer referred to ICU leaders as “extremists to the core” who were “controlled by al-Qaeda.”20 Ethiopia took this high-level US condemnation as a green light for a full-scale invasion. Six days later, as ICU militias attempted to capture Baidoa, Ethiopian warplanes buttressed by thousands of Ethiopian and TFG soldiers struck back, decimating the poorly armed ICU militias. On December 24, 2006, after months of military buildup, some 8,000 Ethiopian troops, supported by tanks and attack helicopters, advanced on Mogadishu, bombing Somalia’s two main airports along the way. The UN Security Council was silent. Its failure to condemn the Ethiopian invasion confirmed Somali views that the international body was not a neutral broker of peace, but a partisan force that had sanctioned foreign intervention to bolster a client regime that had virtually no internal support.
While the UN tacitly condoned the Ethiopian offensive, the United States actively supported it. The State Department referred to the invasion as a legitimate response to aggression by Somali Muslim extremists. Convinced that the al-Qaeda militants who had planned the 1998 and 2002 attacks in Kenya and Tanzania were hiding in southern Somalia under ICU protection, US intelligence officials were determined to root them out. The Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), a Djibouti-based counterterrorism entity comprising nearly 2,000 US military and civilian personnel, provided satellite photos and other intelligence to the Ethiopian army to help it locate ICU fighters. Planes piloted by US Special Operations Forces took off from bases in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya and joined Ethiopian aircraft in bombing ICU strongholds. As the invasion progressed, US Special Operations Forces, functioning from a secret airfield in Ethiopia, entered Somalia alongside the Ethiopian army, purportedly to track down the al-Qaeda suspects.21 US ground troops helped Ethiopian soldiers gather evidence, while the US Navy patrolled the Somali coast and intercepted ships to search for al-Qaeda operatives. Fearing massive bloodshed and the destruction of Mogadishu, business and clan leaders urged the ICU to disband and to abandon the capital without resistance. The ICU militias complied and retreated toward the Kenyan border, pursued by intelligence and security forces from Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and the United States. In a rendition program run by Ethiopia, the United States, and the TFG, militants were rounded up and deported to secret detention facilities in Ethiopia. On January 8, 2007, TFG President Yusuf entered the capital for the first time since taking office in 2004.
The joint Ethiopian-US operation resulted in an increase, rather than a decrease, in chaos and violence. Within weeks of the foreign invasion, a homegrown insurgency had begun, rallying al-Shabaab and other ICU militias, clans that had been marginalized by the TFG, and a wide range of groups that benefited from anarchy, including warlord militias, hired gunmen, arms and drug traffickers, smugglers, and profiteers. The Somali insurgents were joined by fighters from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Arabian Peninsula who responded to the call to wage jihad against Ethiopia. Warlord and clan militias set up roadblocks and shook down residents. Banditry and extortion, which had been suppressed by the ICU, returned with a vengeance. Using weapons left over from the Cold War, including AK-47 assault rifles, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades, insurgents attacked TFG and Ethiopian troops, government buildings, and infrastructure. Employing techniques developed by Iraqi resisters after the 2003 US invasion, they discharged landmines, suicide bombs, and improvised explosive devices, and they targeted TFG officials for assassination. In mid-January 2007, the TFG parliament declared a state of emergency and granted the president broad powers to enforce security.
Foreign involvement assumed a new dimension in February, when the UN Security Council authorized the establishment of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), which was slated to deploy 8,000 African peacekeepers of diverse nationalities to replace the Ethiopian soldiers shoring up the TFG. Funded by the UN and the EU, the AU force appeared to many Somalis as yet another case of unwanted foreign intrusion. The fact that most of the troops came from the predominantly Christian countries of Uganda and Burundi augmented public hostility. Moreover, the AU force was slow to arrive—only 2,600 soldiers were in place by August 2008. As a result, Ethiopian soldiers would remain on Somali soil until early 2009.
In March 2007, the Ethiopian military launched an offensive on Mogadishu to capture key locations from insurgents who had held parts of the capital since the ICU’s departure in January. Assisted by TFG police, Ethiopian soldiers cracked down on Hawiye neighborhoods and closed ports and airfields belonging to Hawiye businessmen, charging that the clan was supporting the insurgency. Widespread arrests, assaults, looting, and rape—perpetrated both by Ethiopian soldiers and by TFG police who were trained and paid by the UN Development Programme—intensified popular support for the insurgency.
The ensuing two-month-long battle for Mogadishu precipitated the most destructive fighting in a decade and a half. By the end of April, some 1,300 Mogadishu residents had been killed, and more than 400,000 had fled their homes. Human rights organizations accused participants on all sides of war crimes. They charged that Ethiopian forces had engaged in widespread and indiscriminate bombing of densely populated areas as well as the collective punishment of civilians, including mass arrests and summary executions. They also claimed that the Ethiopian military had intentionally shelled hospitals, pillaged medical equipment, and blocked the flow of humanitarian assistance, and that Ethiopian and TFG soldiers had raped, plundered, and killed with impunity. Human rights groups asserted that insurgents had also engaged in assassinations and summary executions and that they had demonstrated disregard for civilian lives by mounting attacks from densely populated neighborhoods, which then bore the brunt of Ethiopian and TFG retaliation.
Violence continued to escalate throughout 2007. Badly weakened by infighting and defections, the TFG was on the verge of collapse. By January 2008, al-Shabaab, other ICU militias, and their allies had recovered much of the territory they had lost a year earlier. Al-Shabaab garnered some civilian support, especially in southern Somalia, where it established a semblance of law and order and a justice system that followed years of abuse by warlord militias and government police. In March 2008, the US State Department designated al-Shabaab a “foreign terrorist organization.”22 Critics warned that the label could enhance al-Shabaab’s popularity and at the same time render negotiations with the organization nearly impossible. Matters