Attack in Somalia

On August 24, 2010, a group of insurgents disguised as police officers raided a hotel that was generally labeled as a safer building of Mogadishu and of Somalia as a whole. This hotel was also known for housing lawmakers, four of whom died during the insurgents’ attack. According to Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times, the insurgents “burst in, shot at a number of people, and then a few of the attackers, who were apparently suicide bombers, blew themselves up.” The final death toll was not tallied, but it consists of at least thirty, four of whom were lawmakers as mentioned above.

Gettleman also interviewed J. Peter Pham, senior vice president at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, who claimed the attacks showed that “operational momentum has shifted to the insurgents, who can go anywhere they want except where the African peacekeepers are deployed.” After this attack, hopeful prospects diminished, as the possibility of a completely vanished government grew immensely more conceivable.

A member of the Somali parliament (who was in Nairobi during the attack), stated that the Somali government “isn’t working towards security…it’s just the same old thing.” Most members of the Somali parliament don’t even reside in Somalia due to the daily dangers of the insurgents; most live in Kenya. However, she states that the African Union members and their 6,000 troops are not doing anything either, and questions, “if they are not protecting M.P.’s, then who are they protecting?”

A significant problem is that Al Shabab always seems to be “two steps ahead of Somalia’s transitional government,” even though the Somali government receives tens of millions of dollars in security aid from the United Nations and other Western countries. However, Al Shabab is, indubitably on the offensive, as the hotel raid followed the intense shelling against government positions that occurred the day before; this incident killed dozens of people and sent shells crashing into camps for “internally displaced people.”