June 22, 2015 | Daily Monitoring Report
NISA Carries Out An Operation In Baardheere
22 June – Source: Jowhar Online – 168 Words
The Somali National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) announced that its special forces conducted a successful attack on an Al-Shabaab base in Gedo region where it says an Al-Shabaab meeting was taking place. NISA said that military operation on the remote Al-Shabaab base killed several Al-Shabaab fighters. So far there has not been any independent confirmation of NISA’s claims. The Ministry of Security spokesman Mohamed Yusuf told state radio said the latest raid against Al-Shabaab is part of larger operations that the security forces have began. If NISA’s claims are real, this would be the first operation against Al-Shabaab in their stronghold town of Baardheere.
Key Headlines
- Somali Parliament Speaker Arrives In Cadaado (Mustqbal Radio)
- NISA Carries Out An Operation In Geedo Town (Jowhar Online)
- Finance Minister “We have 49% Of Budget Deficit ” (Goobjoog News)
- Somali President Receives IGAD Delegation At His Office (Goobjoog News)
- Galmudug Assembly Set To Open Today (Somali Current)
- Three KDF Servicemen Injured After IED Explodes In Lamu (Standard Digital)
- Somalia Parliament In Heated Debate Over Border With Kenya (Standard Digital)
- Mo Farah Gets Back To Work In The French Pyrennees After An Extraordinary Week Of Revelations And Denials (Daily Mail)
- Somalia Gets First IMF Review Of Its Economy In 25 Years (The Africa Report)
- Reflection on Hassan M. Abukar’s ‘Mogadishu Memoir’ (Sahan Journal)
- It’s Not Yet Too Late For KDF Troops To Leave Somalia To Promote Peace There (Daily Nation)
PRESS STATEMENT
AMISOM Commends Astute Response Of Somali Security Forces
21 June – Source: AMISOM -154 Words
The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) commends the effective response of the Somali Security Forces to the attempted attack on civilians in Mogadishu, today.The National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) together with other Somali security personnel responded in a timely manner and effectively thwarted yet another attempt at disrupting peace in Mogadishu.
The Head of AMISOM, Ambassador Maman Sidikou commends the Somali security forces and calls on all Somali citizens to work together with the security agencies and AMISOM to prevent and thwart any attacks, especially meant to cause harm during the holy month of Ramadan.“The month of Ramadan is one of prayer, reflection and care for one another. Targeting and killing of innocent civilians is not acceptable. I appeal to all our Somali brothers and sisters to unite and support Somalia security forces and AMISOM in the battle against the enemies of peace and prosperity in Somalia,” said Amb. Sidikou
NATIONAL MEDIA
Somali Parliament Speaker Arrives In Cadaado
22 June – Source: Radio Mustaqbal – 93 Words
Reports from Cadaado indicate that the Speaker of the Somali Parliament Mohamed Osman Jawaari has arrived in the town of Cadaado. The Speaker was welcomed at the airport and he is expected to arrive in the Kafaalo Hall where delegates are meeting. The swearing in of the members of parliament for the Galmudug State is scheduled to take place in the hall. At the same time, the speaker is expected to attend the 1st session of the new Galmudug parliament, this is according to one of the delegate of the conference who spoke to Mustaqbal.
Finance Minister “We have 49% Of Budget Deficit ”
22 June – Source: Goobjoog News – 171 Words
The Finance Minister Mohamed Adan Fargeti has addressed the parliament on the government’s 2014-2015 budget, acknowledging a great deal of deficit totaling almost half of the government’s budget. MPs grilled the minister on how the government spent $49 million dollars and why civil servants are going without salary for months. “The ministry is busy adjusting the financial system of the country, we are seeing significant recovery, we managed to employ the IMF accredited FMIS system which [will] process all financial transactions electronically, this is for transparency purposes” said the minister.
However, the Finance Minister has acknowledged budget deficit after international aid has stopped reaching the government. 49% of the current budget allocation was supposed to be financed by the international partners. The minister also spoke about some bills that his ministry is currently drafting, this includes National Procurement Bill, Good Governance and Transparency Bill and Anti Money Laundering Bill. As for government employee salaries, the minister said he hopes that the new agreement with World Bank would be helpful in the matter.
Somali President Receives IGAD Delegation At His Office
21 June- Source: Goobjoog News – 109 Words
High level delegation led by IGAD general secretary Mahboub Malin met Somali president at his Office in Villa Somalia. The meeting focused on the security status of the country, New Deal, 2016 election and state building processes in the country. Mahboub has praised security development in the country and stressed the role of IGAD in Somalia and assured Somali President that the support of IGAD will continue. The Somali president thanked the delegation and acknowledge the difficulties that the country is going through but said he remains optimistic for the future and IGAD support will be necessary for the country’s progress.
Galmudug Assembly Set To Open Today
21 June – Source: Somali Current – 142 Words
A near complete list of members of the Galmudug assembly was today submitted to the technical committee that is charged with overseeing the formation of the administration.The chairman of the technical committee Halimo Ismail Ibrahim lauded the clan elders for beating the deadline and submitting a list that satisfied the constitutional requirements of an assembly member.“We are happy that we have full list of the assembly members two days to the deadline. We would like to commend the clan elders for their diligence and wise choice,” she said, adding that the rest of the remaining positions have to be filled by the end of the weekend in order to have a full assembly by Monday. Halima stated that the new member would be inaugurated on Monday. The MPs will then attend the first official sitting and deliberate on the election of the president and his government.
INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
Three KDF Servicemen Injured After IED Explodes In Lamu
22 June – Source: Standard Digital – 169 Words
Three Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) soldiers were Al Shabaab injured after their vehicle was hit by an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) in Lamu County. Lamu County AP Commander Crispus Mutali said the vehicle was in a convoy of five trucks ferrying soldiers to Ras Kamboni, Somalia when the incident happened at around 11.30am along the Baragoni-Kiunga road. The landmine is suspected to have been planted by the Al-Shabaab militants who escaped after the April 14 botched attack on a military camp in Baure. “The five trucks were heading to Ras Kamboni and when they reached Milimani, an IED detonated and three officers sustained minor injuries,” said Mutali Sunday evening. The military is carrying out an operation to flush out Al-Shabaab remnants believed to have fled into the vast Boni Forest after the military camp raid. KDF Spokesman Colonel David Obonyo and Inspector General of Police Joseph Boinett also confirmed three servicemen suffered soft tissue injuries after the IED exploded.
Road Accident Kills 10 Somali Troops In Puntland – UPDATE
21 June – Source: PressTV – 213 Words
At least ten members of Somali security forces have been killed and 20 others injured in a road accident in the country’s northeastern semi-autonomous Puntland region. Local Somali security officials said the accident happened on the road between the towns of Garowe and Lasanod on Sunday. The accident happened after a military truck, which had an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back, overturned in the troubled region. “The death toll will possibly increase,” DPA news agency quoted an unnamed regional police official as saying. Road accidents are common in the war-ravaged country due to poor road construction, badly maintained vehicles, routine disregard of traffic laws, and lack of proper driving skills.
In a separate development on Sunday, at least four Al-Shabaab militants were killed after they detonated a car bomb while attempting to storm a military intelligence complex in the Somali capital of Mogadishu. Somalia has been the scene of fierce fighting between Shebab militants and government forces since 2006. The militants have been pushed out of Mogadishu and other major cities by government soldiers and the African Union Mission to Somalia. The militants have, however, continued to launch terrorist attacks in Mogadishu despite being ousted from their bases in the seaside city in 2011.
Somalia Parliament In Heated Debate Over Border With Kenya
21 June – Source: Standard Digital – 452 Words
The barrier that the government seeks to build along the border with Somalia was a subject of heated debate in the Somali Parliament on Saturday. While debating a motion about the wall in the Somali capital Mogadishu, Somali MPs expressed reservations about the plan, terming the the move as unilateral as Kenya has not consulted the Somali government. Speaker of the Somali Parliament Prof. Usman Jawaari called on the Kenya government not to take unilateral actions regarding the border without consulting the Somali government in order to build consensus and durable solutions. “It would not be wise for Kenya to decide where the wall will be built without involving us since that is a shared border. The Somali government should not be ignored in this process,” he was quoted by Radio Mogadishu, the official mouthpiece of the Somali Federal Government.
He added, “We don’t think constructing a wall along the border offers a sustainable solution to the problem of insecurity and terrorism perpetrated by criminal elements causing chaos to the entire region. Instead we need to work together closely to defeat them.” The Vice Chairperson of Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs Mohammed Dalha claimed that the proposed barrier threatens the nationhood and independence of Somalia. He called for a review of the plan saying there are better ways to fight cross-border terrorism coming from outlawed groups. MP Abdi Hashi called on the Somali government to engage the Kenya government to sort out the issue amicably claiming the wall was an “aggression” against Somalia.
According to Radio Mogadishu, most of the MPs in the usually divided house were largely united in expressing reservations about the wall during the heated debate. Recently, some Somali officials have claimed that the border barrier is not being built on the correct border between the two countries and expressed fear that Somalia may lose huge tracts of land. In addition, residents of the border town of Bulla Hawo staged demonstrations claiming that the markings on where the wall is to be built has “annexed” territory that belongs to Somalia. Since reports emerged that the government is planning to build some sort of barrier along the entire length of the 700 kilometer border with Somalia, the issue has generated debate and controversy but it has not been officially debated in the Kenyan parliament to determine its merits and demerits.
Mo Farah Gets Back To Work In The French Pyrennees After An Extraordinary Week Of Revelations And Denials
21 June – Source: Daily Mail – 757 Words
There is no shortage of sporting talent training in the town of Font Romeu in the French Pyrennees. Genzebe Dibaba, one of the greatest distance runners on the planet and a household name in her native Ethiopia, is there at the moment, as are the entire Scotland rugby union team. They all use the same six-lane track and infield but the photographers were interested in taking snaps of one man only. Mo Farah had disappeared from public view for almost two weeks during which time Sportsmail revelations have intensified the crisis engulfing him and his coach Alberto Salazar. But with his top off and shades on, Farah cut a relaxed figure seemingly putting his troubles to one side and getting back to work training at high altitude.
He comes to Font Romeu every year around this time and will remain here until the Monaco Diamond league on July 17, his first competition since a BBC documentary aired, alleging Salazar had been doping other athletes. Farah, 31, Olympic and World 5,000metres and 10,000m champion, will race over 1500m in Monaco in the same stadium where he set a European record of 3min 28.81sec when he last raced over the shorter distance. It will be a stern examination of how much the recent claims against Salazar and Sportsmail’s revelation that he missed two drug tests in the run-up to London 2012 have taken out of him. But a bigger test looming is how Farah will react when Salazar makes public a dossier of ‘evidence’ which he promised will disprove the allegations made against him, among them that he plied another top athlete, Galen Rupp, with drugs when Rupp was still a schoolboy.
Salazar, who has communicated by text and email with selected journalists, is expected to break his silence before the USA World Championship trials which begin in Eugene, Oregon on Friday. Although it remains to be seen how he will answer claims of malpractice to varying degrees from a total of 17 former athletes and staff members at the Nike Oregon Project training group he heads up. Salazar has stayed in Oregon, along with a team of Nike lawyers, compiling emails, phone records and statements. In Font Romeu, Farah is accompanied by Barry Fudge, British Athletics’ head of endurance, who is said to be working on Salazar’s behalf, administering the training sessions he planned. Meanwhile, it was confirmed Farah’s doorbell was rung several times over the course of an hour yet he still missed a test in 2011, after incurring a first strike for missing a test in 2010. UK Anti Doping’s legal director Graham Arthur told BBC Radio 5 Live’s Sportsweek programme: ‘For an hour slot test the process is that the drug tester will turn up at the address given, ring the bell or knock on the door and try to get the athlete’s attention.
Somalia Gets First IMF Review Of Its Economy In 25 Years
21 June – Source: The Africa Report – 359 Words
The International Monetary Fund has completed its first economic consultation on Somalia in more than 25 years, saying the economy of the nation that is rebuilding after decades of conflict grew by 3.7 percent in 2014. Somalia’s growth may lag others in the region but the government will be encouraged by the mere fact that an annual IMF Article IV consultation has taken place, marking a step to rehabilitation, even if the team held discussions in Nairobi. Economic activity is estimated to have expanded by 3.7 percent in 2014, driven by growth in agriculture, construction and telecommunications,” the IMF said in a statement at the end of its June 8-18 mission. “With modest progress on the security front and an absence of drought, medium-term annual growth should be about 5 percent. Nevertheless, growth will remain inadequate to redress poverty and gender disparities,” it said.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and his government, supported by international donors and African troops, is battling an insurgency by the Islamist group al Shabaab, which wants to impose its strict interpretation of Islam on Somalia. An offensive by African Union peacekeepers and Somali troops launched last year has driven the militants out of major urban strongholds and into smaller pockets of territory, but it still stages regular attacks on the capital and elsewhere. The report said consumer price inflation was 1.3 percent in 2014. It also forecast real growth for 2015 of 2.7 percent with inflation remaining subdued at about 4 percent. The IMF noted that the government was still heavily dependent on aid, calling for the strengthening of fiscal institutions and improving revenue raising. Part of the rebuilding effort involves creating a federal structure to run a country that was torn apart first by fighting between clan warlords and then battles with Islamist rebels.
OPINION, ANALYSIS, AND CULTURE
What is striking about the book is its honesty about issues that are hardly discussed in contemporary Somali society: the clan for instance. Clan conflict has been blamed as the main factor in the civil war with atrocities committed in the name of clan, especially in the capital city Mogadishu, where Lidwein Kaptjeins claims in a recent book that “clan cleansing” actually took place.
Reflection on Hassan M. Abukar’s ‘Mogadishu Memoir’
21 June – Source: Sahan Journal – 1346 Words
Hassan Abukar, Somali writer, who left Mogadishu in 1978 at the age of 18, has recently written a memoir on his early life in the city. Hassan was born in the early 1960s during Somalia’s independence and at the height of Somali nationalistic fervor. It was a period when the northern British Somaliland, in the interest of Somali unity, willingly joined with their southern brethren, the then Italian Somaliland, to form the Somali Democratic Republic. Hassan’s childhood evokes a different time and a place which is hard to imagine for those born especially after the Somali civil war of 1991. Current Mogadishu, to use the words of former Washington Post foreign correspondent Keith Richburg, looks like “a Mad Max movie set,” an image that Mogadishu is slowly shedding with the political transitions in the last four years and the pushing out of al-Shabaab from major urban centers. Hassan writes about a period of Somali history where close social cohesion was the norm, a period of relative freedom and cosmopolitan values of tolerance. The book opens with a poignant chapter, Close, yet far away, on young Hassan’s relationship with his father. At the age of six or seven, Hassan is asked by his larger-than-life mother to come and greet his father who had come calling on the family:
“The recent stand-off between Madobe’s interim administration in Jubbaland and the Federal Government of Somalia in Mogadishu now puts Kenyan troops in the awkward position of being allied to the former but mandated to protect the latter. Meanwhile, Ethiopian troops have also joined Amisom and are now controlling the Gedo region that borders both Kenya and Ethiopia. Thus, two frontline states that should have never militarily intervened in Somalia are now being viewed as occupying forces by most Somalis.”
It’s Not Yet Too Late For KDF Troops To Leave Somalia To Promote Peace There
21 June – Source: Daily Nation – 683 Words
No one can doubt that Kenya is failing miserably in its counter-terrorism efforts. From Westgate to Mandera and Garissa, the death toll of Kenyan civilians killed by Al-Shabaab has now risen to more than 600. Apart from corruption within both the security and immigration services, which are now widely recognised as key facilitators of terrorists, blame can also be placed on senior government officials and corrupt brokers who pocketed millions of shillings through fake contracts that failed to deliver strategically important security equipment to Kenya. We could say that Anglo Leasing and other scams paved the way for the terrorism that we are now witnessing. However, Kenya’s failure to stem the threat posed by Al-Shabaab is also the result of strategic and tactical mistakes made by the Kenyan Government and the military.
The first of these mistakes was to invade Somalia in October 2011, which defied the international peacekeeping rule of countries sharing a common border not militarily intervening in one another’s territory. This rule prevents conflict of interest and border disputes that could lead to more instability. Ethiopia ignored this rule in 2006 when it ousted the Islamic Courts Union from Mogadishu and stayed in Somalia for two years until it was forced out by Al-Shabaab, the extremist stepchild of the ICU that was gaining strength in south and central Somalia. This paved the way for the African Union to send in soldiers to expel Al-Shabaab from the capital. Uganda and Burundi were the first countries to offer their troops. Strangely, Kenya, instead of offering its troops to the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom), decided to go it alone. Warmongers in the Mwai Kibaki administration believed that in order to secure a safe “buffer zone” between Kenya and Somalia, Kenya needed to oust Al-Shabaab from southern Somalia and take control of the port of Kismayu, the group’s economic lifeline.
This decision was made without any prior consultation with the Kenyan people or even their elected representatives in Parliament. On the face of it, Operation Linda Nchi sounded like a good idea, but there were fatal mistakes made along the way. The first of these, supported by Igad and the United States, was for the Kenya Defence Forces to train Somalis for their national army. Apparently, the youth who ended up getting military training were not Somali nationals, but Kenyan Somalis. Many of these youth abandoned their training due to poor remuneration and some deserted the Kenyan army during its mission in Somalia. It is believed that many are now selling their military services to the highest bidder, including Al-Shabaab. Kenya thus inadvertently created insecurity within its own borders.
TOP TWEETS
@africamedia_CPJ africa @pressfreedom retweeted Abdalle Ahmed Mumin Remembering
@RadioErgo journalist Yusuf Keynan, killed one year ago in#Somalia http://cpj.org/x/5bde
@Cabdalleaxmed Today one year ago my friend & brother Yusuf Kaynan was killed in a car bomb in #Mogadishu#Somalia @africamedia_CPJ
@Goobjoognews #Somalia Parliament speaker due to arrive in Adado to attend the swearing in ceremony for MPs of regional assembly.
@4DialogSK [Stop the bleeding argues @RasnaWarah] It’s not yet too late for #KDF troops to leave #Somalia to promote peace there http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/
@AmbAmerico Ramadan Kareem. Tonight “Subac Soon” in my house #Somalia.
@ActForSomalia Newly renovated Mogadishu Municipality Headquarters opened by President Hassan Sheikh&Mayor Hassan Mungab.
IMAGE OF THE DAY
Newly renovated Mogadishu Municipality Headquarters opened by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud and Mayor Hassan Mungab.
Photo: @ActForSomalia