Somali Islamists Getting Help From Eritrea

The Somali Islamists were getting assistance from Ethiopia's arch rival Eritrea. Put it another way, and Eritrea was siding with al Qaeda and the Islamists against the official Somali government and Ethiopia.

Ethiopia’s longtime rival, Eritrea, had troops in the country for about four months prior to that. A confidential UN report drafted by the Monitoring Group on Somalia in late 2006 says that “2000 fully equipped combat troops from Eritrea” arrived to the north of Mogadishu in late August, and redeployed to different areas held by the ICU. According to high-level sources in Somalia’s transitional government and U.S. intelligence, these Eritrean troops never left the country—a development unknown to American policymakers until today.

Eritrea, an African nation found between the Red Sea and Ethiopia, has a history of violence with its larger neighbor. Eritrea fought a bloody campaign for independence from Ethiopia, which had annexed it in the early 1960s, and has since fought a border war with Ethiopia from 1998 until December 2000.

Eritrea supported the ICU as a proxy intended to destabilize Ethiopia, said Dahir Jibreel, the permanent secretary in charge of international cooperation for Somalia’s transitional government.

Pajamas Media spoke with Ismael “Buubba” Hurreh, the minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation for the transitional government of Somlia. He said that Eritrean soldiers have been fighting on the front lines alongside the ICU, and that hundreds of Eritreans have been killed since Ethiopia’s incursion.

This revelation sheds further light on how Eritrea has actively helped the ICU try to topple Somalia’s secular government. While the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia’s report makes clear that Eritrea provided a great deal of assistance to the Islamic Courts prior to the outbreak of the conflict with Ethiopia, this is the first confirmation that Eritrean troops have assumed an active combat role.

A senior U.S. military intelligence officer confirmed that Eritrean troops were killed during the initial fighting in Somalia. He said that the Eritreans were “assisting and facilitating,” essentially in a military advisor role, rather than taking the kind of active role that the Ethiopians have on the side of the transitional government. He declined to specify what kind of assistance the Eritreans have provided.

The Ethiopians had long contended that the Somali Islamists were threatening to destabilize and undermine Ethiopian territorial integrity, and this report bears out those fears, which pushed Ethiopia to act decisively.

Meanwhile, the last bastion of the Islamists inside Somalia is near collapse. Ed Morrissey has the details.

UPDATE 1/14/2007:
Cleaned up quoted text.