Category Archives: Somalia

Iran, Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, Libya, Somalia, Somaliland, Sudan, Syria, United States, Yemen

A country-by-country look at Trump’s immigration executive order

2 Comments
Yazidi women in both Syria and Iraq have suffered greatly at the hands of ISIS — but they will be caught up in Trump-era restrictions on refugees all the same. (Reuters)

There’s a neighborhood in Los Angeles, commonly known as Tehrangeles, that is home to up to a half-million Persian Americans, most of whom fled Iran after the 1979 Islamic republic or who are their second-generation children and third-generation grandchildren, all of them American citizens. 

The neighborhood runs along Westwood Boulevard, and it is home to some of the wealthiest Angelinos. But under the executive action that US president Donald Trump signed Friday afternoon, their relatives in Iran will have a much more difficult time visiting them in Los Angeles (or elsewhere in the United States). The impact of the order, over the weekend, proved far deeper than originally imagined last week when drafts of the order circulated widely in the media.

The ban attempts to accomplish at least five different actions, all of which began to take effect immediately on Friday:

  • First, the order institutes a ban for 90 days on immigrants from seven countries — Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Libya.
  • Secondly, the ban initially seemed to include even US permanent residents with valid green cards with citizenship from those seven countries (though the Department of Homeland Security was walking that back on Sunday, after reports that presidential adviser and former Breitbart editor Steve Bannon initially overruled DHS objections Friday). But it also includes citizens of third countries with dual citizenship (which presents its own problems and which the White House does not seem to be walking back).
  • Third, it institutes a 120-day freeze on all refugees into the United States from anywhere across the globe and an indefinite ban for all refugees from Syria.
  • Fourth, it places a cap of 50,000 on all refugees for 2017 — that’s far less than nearly 85,000 refugees who were admitted to the United States in 2016, though it’s not markedly less than the nearly 55,000 refugees admitted in 2011 (the lowest point of the Obama administration) and it’s more than the roughly 25,000 to 30,000 refugees admitted in 2002 and 2003 during the Bush administration.
  • Fifth, and finally, when the United States once again permits refugees, it purports to prioritize admitting those refugees ‘when the person is a religious minority in his country of nationality facing religious persecution.’ It’s widely assumed that this is a back-door approach to prioritizing Christian refugees. More on that below.

In practice, it’s already incredibly difficult to get a visa of any variety if you are coming from one of those countries, with a few exceptions. But formalizing the list is both overbroad (it captures mostly innocent travelers and refugees) and underbroad (it doesn’t include potential terrorists from other countries), and experts believe it will hurt US citizens, US businesses and bona fide refugees who otherwise might have expected asylum in the United States. On Sunday, many Republican leaders, including Arizona senator John McCain admitted as such:

Ultimately, we fear this executive order will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism. At this very moment, American troops are fighting side-by-side with our Iraqi partners to defeat ISIL. But this executive order bans Iraqi pilots from coming to military bases in Arizona to fight our common enemies. Our most important allies in the fight against ISIL are the vast majority of Muslims who reject its apocalyptic ideology of hatred. This executive order sends a signal, intended or not, that America does not want Muslims coming into our country. That is why we fear this executive order may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security.

On the campaign trail, Trump initially called for a ban on all Muslims from entering the country; when experts responded that such a broad-based religious test would be unconstitutional, Trump said he would instead extend the ban on the basis of nationality.

Friday’s executive action looks like the first step of institutionalizing the de facto Muslim ban that Trump originally promised (thought it would on its face be blatantly unconstitutional).

Of course, as many commentators have noted, the list doesn’t contain the countries that match the nationalities of the September 2001 hijackers — mostly Saudi Arabia. But it doesn’t contain Lebanon, though Hezbollah fighters have aligned with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in that country’s civil war. It doesn’t include Egypt, which is the most populous Muslim country in north Africa and home to one of the Sept. 2001 terrorists. Nor does it include Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country. Nor Pakistan nor Afghanistan, where US troops fought to eradicate forms of hardline Taliban government and where US troops ultimately tracked and killed Osama bin Laden.

This isn’t a call to add more countries to the list, of course, which would be even more self-defeating as US policy. But it wouldn’t surprise me if Bannon and Trump, anticipating this criticism, will use it to justify a second round of countries.

In the meanwhile, the diplomatic fallout is only just beginning (and certainly will intensify — Monday is the first full business day after we’ve read the actual text of Friday’s executive order). Already, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel, citing the obligations of international law under the Geneva Conventions, disavowed the ban. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau used it as an opportunity to showcase his country’s openness to immigration and welcomed the refugees to Canada. Even Theresa May, the British prime minister who shared a stage with Trump in Washington on Friday afternoon, distanced herself from the ban, and British foreign minister Boris Johnson called it ‘divisive.’

But the most direct impact will be felt in relations with the seven countries directly affected by the ban, and there are already indications that the United States will suffer a strategic, diplomatic and possible economic price for Trump’s hasty unilateral executive order.  Continue reading A country-by-country look at Trump’s immigration executive order →

Jubaland, Kenya, Somalia

Westgate Mall siege the first test of Uhuru Kenyatta’s mettle as Kenya’s new president

2 Comments

kenyatta

UPDATE:  Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta has made a statement about today’s assault on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, which has killed 39 people.  Declaring terrorism a ‘philosophy of cowards,’ and declaring Kenya will respond in a manner ‘as brave and invincible as the lions on our coats of arms,’ Kenyatta responded with grace, strength and compassion, rallying the unity of the Kenyan people.

The despicable perpetrators of this cowardly act hoped to intimidate, divide and cause despondency among Kenyans.  They would like us to retreat into a closed, fearful and fractured society where trust, unity and enterprise are difficult to muster.  An open and united country is a threat to evildoers everywhere.

It’s worth watching in full:

* * * * *

Today’s attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall — perhaps the deadliest terrorist attack in Kenya since the 1998 assault on the US embassy in Nairobi — is the first crisis of the nascent presidency of Uhuru Kenyatta.Jubaland_flagsomaliakenya

Al-Shabab, the Somali militant group, has taken responsibility for the attack.  The assailants, who attacked the mall with a combination of machine guns and grenades, may have killed over 30 people and injured many more.  It’s not the first time the radical Somali group has threatened Kenya — and it follows an al-Shabab attack in July 2010 in Kampala, Uganda, that killed 74 people within a peaceful crowd that had gathered to watch the 2010 World Cup finals.

Al-Shabab’s rationale lies in the Kenyan invasion of Jubaland, the semi-autonomous tract of southern Somalia, in October 2011 and its subsequent role as part of an African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia.  But the sudden attack on a shopping mall full of civilians — including expatriates, women and children — is a senseless and asymmetrical act of terrorism.

Even as we remember the victims of today’s tragedy and even as our thoughts remain with Nairobi police, Kenya Defense Force officials and hospital and health care workers carrying out rescue and recovery efforts, Kenyan policymakers face some weighty and difficult days ahead.

Kenyatta (pictured above, left) wasn’t president at the time of Kenya’s initial invasion, and he didn’t ask for this conflict when he was elected in March 2013 as Kenya’s fourth post-independence president.

But the challenge is his first serious crisis as president.  That’s not to say that the challenges of boosting Kenya’s economy or maintaining the calm and orderly process of sorting out land reform in Kenya.  But Kenyatta’s response to the Westgate killings places the Somali question at the heart of his administration, even amid signs that Somalia’s central government based in Mogadishu, with strong support from the African Union and Western governments, is making tentative strides (at least compared to more than two decades of civil war and state failure following the fall of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991).

It’s not an enviable position for Kenyatta.

If Kenyatta withdraws into what has been the traditional comfort zone of Kenya’s military and civilian leadership, it will mean that the most powerful (and still, even after today, by far the most stable) east African country is backing away from its vital role in solving east Africa’s most pressing regional security challenge.  But if Kenyatta launches a hasty, retributive wave into southern Somalia in the weeks or months ahead, he could also risk drawing Kenyans further into a quagmire — with the possibility of future al-Shabab terrorist attacks within Kenya.  Striking the right balance will be crucial.

somalia Continue reading Westgate Mall siege the first test of Uhuru Kenyatta’s mettle as Kenya’s new president →

Afghanistan, Somalia, United States

Suffragio goes to the Oscars

Leave a comment

Of course, most Americans this weekend aren’t thinking about the Cypriot presidential election or even the relatively higher-impact Italian elections, but the results of yet another election this weekend in Hollywood — the winners of the 85th Academy Awards. somaliaUSflagafghanistan flag

It’s been a very foreign-policy heavy year for the Oscars.

Zero Dark Thirty, a nominee for best picture, depicts the raid that led to the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan two years ago. It’s ignited anew a political thunderstorm over the use of torture (ahem, I mean enhanced interrogation techniques) in procuring information by the United States in its fight against radical Islamic terrorists.

Argo, another nominee for best picture, directed by Ben Affleck, depicts the daring 1979 raid in Iran by CIA operatives and other, mostly Canadian, nationals to rescue six diplomats from Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis.  Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who approved the raid while in office, and top film critic, recently gave the film two thumbs up.

Indeed, it’s a highly international year for the awards, given that Amour, an Austrian film is up for both best foreign language film and best picture, and Life of Pi, a film based on Yann Martel’s novel of the same name, which won the 2002 Booker Prize, is also up for best film.

Even if the Academy’s rule limiting each country to just one nominee for best foreign film in a year is outdated, No, Chile’s first nomination for best foreign film, stars Gael García Bernal in an impressive picture about the end of Augusto Pinochet’s autocratic rule in that country in 1988.  Nanni Moretti, perhaps the best living director in Italy, will have been disappointed that his Habemus Papam (‘We Have a Pope’), was not nominated, despite the film’s sudden timeliness.

Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy surveys the recent history of films that weigh the issues of U.S. foreign policy, especially in the post-9/11 phase and ponders whether Hollywood itself has a discernible foreign policy view and how that could change in the future:

One big question going forward is whether Hollywood’s increasing reliance on international audiences will affect the kinds of stories that get told. The Academy has shown itself to be more open to films with Indian protagonists like Slumdog Millionaire and The Life of Pi in recent years. Perhaps it will soon be ready for a movie about America’s place in the world where the rest of the planet gets a speaking role.

But Keating ignores two short films that have been nominated for best live action short that, I believe, are really the future of Hollywood — Buzkashi Boys and Asad.

Buzkashi Boys (see trailer above) is a 27-minute film about two young boys in Kabul — and it might be my own favorite film from among the entire oeuvre of 2013 nominees.

bushkazi

Director Sam French has captured an incredibly beautiful side of Kabul — the snowy, mountainous backdrop has never made the war-zone city look more appealing — and in avoiding any direct mention to the 12-year U.S. military action there, has managed to show a side of Afghanistan that’s rarely seen and even more rarely appreciated in the United States.  Notably — and unusually — the U.S. government helped bankroll the film, with a $220,000 grant from the U.S. state department.

It’s the first film shot in Afghanistan to be nominated for any Oscar awards.

The two young stars of the film, Jawanmard Paiz and Fawad Mohammadi, are in Hollywood for tonight’s Oscars, and French has started an education fund for Mohammadi, who French came to know on ‘Chicken Street’ in Kabul as one of many boys selling maps, gum and other small items to foreigners.

Asad, an 18-minute short film produced in South Africa, features a cast of Somali refugees currently living in South Africa, none of which are professional actors, an African version of neorealismo that examines the effects of nearly two decades of civil war and state failure in a small Somali fishing village.  A far cry indeed from the over-the-top depiction of Somalis in Black Hawk Down, which won director Ridley Scott a ‘best director’ nomination in 2001.

In both cases, unlike the more well-known films Keating mentions, which as he correctly notes, all too often lump Muslims worldwide as an ‘undifferentiated mass of beards and hijabs,’ Buzkashi Boys and Asad alike both depict their protagonists in more tender, human, universal and relatable terms.

Regardless of whether either Buzkashi Boys or Asad wins tonight, both are well worth your time for a brief view into the cultures of both Afghanistan and Somalia.

Asad‘s trailer follows below: Continue reading Suffragio goes to the Oscars →

Pakistan, Somalia, United States, Yemen

U.S. justice department memo justifies targeted killings of U.S. citizens abroad

Leave a comment

In 2002 and 2003, assistant U.S. attorney general John Yoo, at the U.S. department of justice, authored now-infamous ‘torture memos’ providing legal justification for ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques, which the administration of U.S. president George W. Bush would proceed to employ against ‘unlawful combatants,’ and in violation of the Geneva Conventions, according to many legal scholars (outside the Bush administration, at least).USflagPakistan Flag Iconsomaliayemen flag

Although we don’t know who wrote it or when it was written, there’s some parallelism in the ‘white paper’ from the justice department of U.S. president Barack Obama, made public today by NBC News, offering up the legal justification for the targeted killing of U.S. citizens who are senior operational leaders of al Qaeda or an associated force of al Qaeda.

Kudos to NBC News for obtaining the memo, which requires that any such U.S. citizen must be an ‘imminent’ threat, capture of the U.S. citizen must be ‘infeasible,’ and the strike must be conducted according to ‘law of war principles.’  Each of those is defined in a manner that’s not exactly narrow — for example, as Michael Isikoff at NBC notes:

“The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states.

Instead, it says, an “informed, high-level” official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American has been “recently” involved in “activities” posing a threat of a violent attack and “there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.” The memo does not define “recently” or “activities.”

The United States, first under the Bush administration, but at a vastly accelerated pace under the Obama administration, has used unmanned drones to attack targets in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan (to say nothing of what we don’t know about their use in more conventional military theaters, such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya over the past decade) — it seems reasonable to believe that drones could soon be used in Afghanistan after U.S. troops leave that country next year, and U.S. capability for drone use in Mali or elsewhere in north Africa would likewise not be a difficult task.

The leaked memo comes day before Congressional hearings on John Brennan’s appointment as Obama’s new director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

There’s not much I can add to what others have already said about the Obama administration memo, though it may well come to define this administration’s unique ‘addition’ to the expanding nature of executive power in the United States, to the detriment of U.S. constitutional civil liberties and even international law.

In September 2011, the United States attacked two U.S. citizens, Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan, in a drone attack in Yemen and, more perhaps troubling, killed Awlaki’s 16-year old son, Abdulrahman, also a U.S. citizen, in a subsequent attack.

Glenn Greenwald, writing for The Guardian in a long and thoughtful takedown of the leaked memo, takes special offense with the lack of due process for accused targets:

The core distortion of the War on Terror under both Bush and Obama is the Orwellian practice of equating government accusations of terrorism with proof of guilt. One constantly hears US government defenders referring to “terrorists” when what they actually mean is: those accused by the government of terrorism. This entire memo is grounded in this deceit….

This ensures that huge numbers of citizens – those who spend little time thinking about such things and/or authoritarians who assume all government claims are true – will instinctively justify what is being done here on the ground that we must kill the Terrorists or joining al-Qaida means you should be killed. That’s the “reasoning” process that has driven the War on Terror since it commenced: if the US government simply asserts without evidence or trial that someone is a terrorist, then they are assumed to be, and they can then be punished as such – with indefinite imprisonment or death.

In contrast, Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union has written a quick reaction that’s subdued in contrast to Greenwald’s response:

My colleagues will have more to say about the white paper soon, but my initial reaction is that the paper only underscores the irresponsible extravagance of the government’s central claim. Even if the Obama administration is convinced of its own fundamental trustworthiness, the power this white paper sets out will be available to every future president—and every “informed high-level official” (!)—in every future conflict. As I said to Isikoff, that’s truly a chilling thought.

Although the memo itself could well stand as an important turning point in the Obama administration’s controversial justification for executing U.S. citizens without due process, what seems even clearer is that as Obama’s second term unfolds, we can expect the continuation and proliferation of the use of drone attacks.  Given the zeal with which U.S. policymakers are apparently pursuing U.S. citizens in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, it seems certain that the Obama administration is even more audacious in its approach to the protection of non-U.S. citizens.

Will Wilkinson at The Economist has recently argued that the Obama administration’s drone program as a whole fails the Kantian principle of ‘universal law’ — i.e., that the United States might not enjoy being on the receiving end of its own logic:

The question Americans need to put to ourselves is whether we would mind if China or Russia or Iran or Pakistan were to be guided by the Obama administration’s sketchy rulebook in their drone campaigns. Bomb-dropping remote-controlled planes will soon be commonplace. What if, by another country’s reasonable lights, America’s drone attacks count as terrorism? What if, according to the general principles implicitly governing the Obama administration’s own drone campaign, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue turns out to be a legitimate target for another country’s drones? Were we to will Mr Obama’s rules of engagement as universal law, a la Kant, would we find ourselves in harm’s way? I suspect we would.

As such, stunning as today’s news is, it’s worth pausing to consider the effects on each of the three countries where the Obama administration is known to be operating drones — as critics note, the drone attacks could ultimately backfire on long-term U.S. interests by antagonizing Muslims outside the United States and potentially radicalizing non-U.S. citizens into supporting more radical forms of terrorism against the United States in the future.

Continue reading U.S. justice department memo justifies targeted killings of U.S. citizens abroad →

Somalia

Who is Hasan Sheikh Mahmoud? And is Somalia capable of turning a new leaf?

2 Comments

Somalia has a new president today — Hasan Sheikh Mahmoud (pictured above) — after his election by Somalia’s new parliament, which itself was sworn in just last month.

Mamhoud defeated current president Sheikh Sharif Ahmed in the second round of voting — although the incumbent won the first round of voting, Mamhoud finished a close second, defeating prime minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, who came in third.

But who is Mahmoud?

And, more importantly, can he succeed where 15 prior transitional governments have failed in reviving a country that vies as perhaps the world’s most infamous failed state?

Mahmoud, and academic and a civic activist, speaks both Somali and English, has worked for the United Nations Children’s Fund in Somalia from 1993 until 1995, and he co-founded the Somali Institute of Management and Administration Development in Mogadishu, the country’s capital, in 1999.  Last year, he formed the Peace and Development Party.

Allegations of bribery (among all factions) are already marring Mahmoud’s victory, but the fact that the vote even took place is perhaps itself the bigger victory for a country that’s effectively been without a government for over two decades– Somalia descended into anarchy and clan-based fighting after the fall of Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, who had ruled the country since 1969.

Recently, a UN-backed transitional roadmap, reinforced by the African Union, has prompted some hope that Somalia may have reached a transition point — the roadmap led to the current political process, and last year, AU and other regional forces ended fighting in Mogadishu.  Although al Shabaab and other militants have been swept from the capital, ending years of street-battle violence, Islamic militants still control much of the rest of the center and south of Somalia.  Al Shabaab  (Islamic for “the youth,” it formed in 2006 as a radical spinoff from Somalia’s main Islamist group, the Union of Islamic Courts, and is now affiliated with al Qaeda).

Despite the gains, Mahmoud and the Somali parliament have a very long road ahead in regard to gaining control in Somalia and securing the entire country, to say nothing of other pressing needs for infrastructure and economic development.  Mahmoud’s legislative counterpart, Mohamed Osman Jawari, who was appointed speaker of the federal parliament on August 28, is also an English-speaking academic and an attorney by occupation.  Jawari served briefly as the minister of transportation and as minister of labor and sports in the Siad Barre regime, and he lived in Norway in exile after civil war broke out in 1991.

Both Mahmoud and Jawari as seen as technocratic and academic moderates, in contrast to both the Islamist fundamentalists who rose to power in 2006 and the warlords of Somalia’s various clans. Continue reading Who is Hasan Sheikh Mahmoud? And is Somalia capable of turning a new leaf? →