Behind the Islamist last retreat

NY Times:

As fighting began to flare up today around Kismayo, the final redoubt for Somalia’s diminished Islamic movement, elders within the city demanded that the Islamists leave.

Mohammed Arab, a leader of the Ogaden sub-clan, said 36 elders of various clans and sub-clans met over the weekend with Islamist leaders and tried to persuade them that resisting the huge Ethiopian-backed force heading toward them would be futile.

“We told them that they were going to lose,” Mr. Arab said, “and that our city would get destroyed.”

Kismayo, a scenic harbor town along the Indian Ocean that was once part of the fabled East African spice empire, had been spared the fighting so far.

But the Islamists, according to Mr. Arab, did not care.

“These guys are bent on war,” he said.

Around 5 p.m., the fighting started, with the Ethiopian-backed forces unleashing an artillery barrage against Islamist troops dug in near Jilib, a town about 30 miles north of Kismayo. As the shells began to rain down, residents said, clan militias within Kismayo turned on the Islamists. That set off running gunbattles across the city, with several people reportedly killed. It also accelerated the exodus out of Kismayo, with thousands of residents hastily tossing a few things over their shoulders and joining the stream of people fleeing the fighting in southern Somalia.

It is hard to know what is going to happen next.

Local support in Kismayo is evaporating, as it did last week in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, when clan elders decided that the Islamists were a losing cause and pulled their troops and weapons out of the movement. That led to the city falling much faster than anyone expected into the hands of Somalia’s transitional government, which has used Ethiopian troops and airpower to reclaim much of the country. Clan elders are the pillars of Somali society, and many of the Islamist fighters in Mogadishu were simply clan militiamen loaned to the movement.

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An then they were all gone, according to this Reuters report. This report has more details on the latest rout of the Islamist. The NY Times report fills in some of the gaps in the motivation for the latest retreat. It also puts an interesting cap on the bombast of the fleeing leaders. A resident of Jilib said he thought the Islamist might go to a hilly area near the Kenya border called Buur Gaabo.