A burst of stray bullets whistled over the half-built perfume factory where the soldiers, some in flip-flops, lounged in a narrow strip of shade. “Don’t worry,” said Colonel Frederick Ndayisaba, smiling. “They are just harassing us.”
Yet his tour of the makeshift base in Somalia’s Afgoye corridor was constantly interrupted by the sound of competing machineguns. There was still, in the words of one officer, plenty of “mopping up” to do.
Al-Shabaab, the Islamist militants who controlled the one-street town of Elasha Biyaha until a few days ago, barely put up a fight in the face of more than 4,000 African Union troops who rolled through the surrounding scrubland with tanks and armoured personnel carriers, Colonel Ndayisaba said.
“We didn’t face much resistance, but they left some elements behind and they have ambushed us,” said the Burundian ground commander, whose troops are part of the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom).
The capture of Elasha Biyaha was part of a bigger operation to take nearby Afgoye, a strategic town that links by road the cities of Kismayo and Baidoa to Mogadishu. It marks the largest assault by far that African Union troops have undertaken since they deployed into Somalia in 2007, and the first time that they have pushed outside the capital.
Advertisement
Although al-Shabaab remains a potent force, the mission has undoubtedly dealt a significant blow to the militants, who have already suffered a series of territorial defeats.
The operation began shortly after dawn on Tuesday of last week when three battalions of Ugandan soldiers left the northern outskirts of Afgoye in a slow, northwesterly arc, while two Burundian battalions mirrored them on the southern side of the Afgoye road.
Lieutenant-Colonel Paddy Ankunda, the Amisom spokesman, said that the soldiers, who were accompanied by about 700 Somali troops, avoided the main road because they did not want to fight in populated areas. Instead, they used tanks to carve paths through the bush, across terrain too rough for most of al-Shabaab’s 4x4 pick-ups, which have heavy machineguns welded on their backs.
Amisom said that four of its soldiers were wounded, one them seriously, and about 60 al-Shabaab militants were killed, including a commander.
Most of the militants fled in convoys beyond the range of Amisom’s guns, Colonel Ankunda said. “When we attacked Afgoye the al-Shabaab just drove off in vehicles, columns of them,” he said. “If we had helicopters we could hit them, but we simply couldn’t do anything about it.”
Advertisement
Some of the fighters went north, towards Puntland, but most went south, towards Barca and their last significant stronghold at Kismayo, the port town that accounts for most of the insurgents’ income.
Kenyan troops have pledged to take Kismayo by August 20, and yesterday said they had captured Afmadow, a key staging posts for any assault on Kismayo. This week they said that their warships had shelled the city.
Apart from cutting al-Shabaab in half, commanders also hope that their operation will let humanitarian aid groups reach up to 400,000 internally displaced people, whose tarpaulin shelters dot the road every few hundred metres between Mogadishu and Elasha Biyaha. The UN said that at least 14,000 people had fled Afgoye since the operation started and 10,000 had reached Mogadishu. Local residents said that the refugees included dozens of militants who were behind a spate of killings in the city.
A spokesman for al-Shabaab said that the group had made a “tactical retreat” after the operation. On Tuesday it attacked the President’s convoy on the road from Afgoye to Mogadishu.
Somalia’s CIA-trained National Intelligence Service and the local police responded by arresting scores of people in the main Afgoye town. An Amisom spokesman said that more than 200 people were detained on suspicion of having links to al-Shabaab.
Advertisement
Elasha Biyaha, which was the old front line, seemed all but deserted, apart from soldiers. Colonel Ndayisaba’s aides said that it was still too dangerous to loiter for more than few minutes, let alone talk to any Somalis not wearing uniform. “Not everyone is a liberated farmer rejoicing in his field,” one official said.
Amisom admits that its work could be for nothing if the Somali Government cannot agree on a constitution, elect an assembly and start behaving like a government.
“Al-Shabaab is no longer the problem,” Colonel Ankunda said. “The leadership needs to appoint leaders, mobilise people and deliver services, and show that it is a better alternative to Shabaab.”