Here we go again. According to the Los Angeles Times, the United States is responsible for the rise of religious extremism and the al Qaeda-linked Shabaab terror group. If we just hadn’t targeted the well-meaning, though slightly radical, Islamic Courts Union, everything in Somalia would be just wonderful — or so the Times would have you believe. Sure, there would be a Taliban-like region in the Horn of Africa, but they’d have security. And certainly there would be no ties to al Qaeda!
…But a glimmer of hope appeared in the early years of this decade when Muslim groups began banding together in a network called the Islamic Courts Union. It imposed a particularly repressive brand of Sharia law on the territories it oversaw, but also brought something the country hadn’t seen for more than a decade: order. The Islamic Courts Union disarmed the populace, tamed the warlords and stamped out piracy on the country’s coast. But its version of Islamic nationalism was deeply troubling to the Bush administration, whose intelligence services reported that it contained radical anti-American elements. Fearing a repeat of the Taliban experience in Afghanistan, the administration first armed warlords who pledged to fight the Islamists, then encouraged the government of next-door Ethiopia, a strong U.S. ally, to invade in 2006. Ethiopian troops encountered little resistance and quickly took over. But the Ethiopians found themselves confronting a grinding insurgency akin to that in Iraq, and a refugee crisis as people fled the increasingly dangerous streets of Mogadishu. Ethiopian troops pulled out in January, leaving a power vacuum behind. Into that vacuum stepped Al Shabaab. With most of the moderate elements of the Islamic Courts Union having left the country or been driven underground during the Ethiopian occupation, it was the radical young members of Al Shabaab who were left to fight the insurgency, and who have emerged as probably the most powerful military force in Somalia.
This wrong-headed argument that has been made by well meaning but totally uninformed left-wing pundits before. I debunked this notion then and it’s not worth restating each misstep in their arguments except for one obvious point. TheTimes claims that “intelligence services reported that it [the Islamic Courts Union] contained radical anti-American elements.” This wasn’t just “reported,” this is a fact. Look no further that one of the two top leaders of the Islamic Courts: Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys. He is designated as a terrorist under Executive Order 13224. And Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, one of the three al Qaeda operatives behind the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania who were sheltered by the Islamic Courts, served as the group’s intelligence chief prior to its fall in early 2007. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, but one that should have been clearly visible to the Los Angeles Times editorial board.
