African Union Force Makes Strides Inside Somalia

(Stuart Price/African Union-United Nations Information Support Team, via AP) Soldiers from Burundi manned positions in Mogadishu last week.

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NYT

NAIROBI, Kenya — When the first batch of African Union peacekeepers landed at Mogadishu’s decrepit airport in 2007, they were immediately shelled by insurgents with mortars and given little chance of success. This was Somalia after all, the graveyard of several other doomed interventions, and the African Union soldiers were a last resort for a deeply troubled mission.

But four years later and nearly 10,000 soldiers strong, the African Union force in Somalia has hardened into a war-fighting machine — and it seems to be winning the war. Analysts say the African Union has done a better job of pacifying Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital and a hornet’s nest of Islamist militants, clan warlords, factional armies and countless glassy-eyed freelance gunmen, than any other outside force, including 25,000 American troops in the 1990s.

The peacekeepers have “performed better than anyone would have dreamed,” said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa program at the Atlantic Council, a Washington research institution.

Their surprising success has put the African Union in the driver’s seat of an intensifying international effort to wipe out Somalia’s Shabab militants, once and for all. Kenya, Ethiopia, the United States, France, Djibouti, Burundi and Uganda have all jumped in to some degree against the Shabab, a brutal and wily insurgent group that is considered both a regional menace and an international threat, with possible sleeper cells embedded in Somali communities in the United States and Europe.

(More here.)