Peace Talk — Autumn 2005
The Quarterly Newsletter of Peace Action MaineSomalis in Portland follow closely the events in Somalia. Many were very happy with the job Abdulkadir Yahya Ali was doing and were very proud of his efforts to bring together warring clans and to expose the atrocities of the warlords. They were very upset by his murder and worried about what his assassination portends for the future of Somalia.
Abdulkadir Yahya Ali worked until his death at age 50 trying to reconcile the warring clans and militias that have turned Somalia into a failed state and a breeding ground for Islamic militants.
My friend Yahya was asleep at home with his wife when several heavily armed vehicles rolled to a stop outside his house. It was raining in Mogadishu, and the patter of droplets obscured the sounds of the night. A group of roughly 10 assassins, wearing masks around their faces, used a ladder to scale the back wall of Yahya’s compound. To find their way in the dark, they had flashlights tied to the barrels of their Kalashnikovs. Yahya’s guards were taken by surprise and handcuffed. The killers entered the house, which apparently was unlocked. Some of the men made their way to a second-floor bedroom and woke Yahya and his wife. They demanded valuables and took Yahya’s laptop. Then they led Yahya to a corridor where they executed him.
I first met Abdulkadir Yahya Ali in Mogadishu in 1991 when he gave me a tour of the Somali capital’s abandoned and pillaged U.S. Embassy. Yahya had worked for the embassy and was one of many Somali employees left behind when helicopters whisked the American ambassador and other foreigners to safety a few months earlier. “Whenever you met him, he always said tomorrow will be better than today,” says one close friend. “Everyone was comfortable with Yahya. Even those who didn’t like [his ideas] would talk to him.”
Yahya was an indefatigable optimist who could have abandoned his country for a well-paying job in a safer place. Instead, he worked until his death at age 50 trying to reconcile the warring clans and militias that have turned Somalia into a failed state and a breeding ground for Islamic militants. “It was a political assassination — the gang was well organized, and they came and killed him very deliberately,” says Jabril Ibrahim Abdulle, who together with Yahya ran the Center for Research and Dialogue in Mogadishu. Although no one knows for sure who carried out the murder, they say that members of a radical Muslim group tied to Al Qaeda are among the suspects.
More than a dozen years after the United States spearheaded Operation Restore Hope, aiming to save Somalia from famine and anarchy, the country continues to be ruled by warlords. A northern area called Somaliland has broken away completely and is relatively stable. But the south is ruled by rival militias. These gangs control different neighborhoods of Mogadishu. Some of those involved in terrorist attacks in Kenya — the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi and the 2002 bomb attack on a luxury hotel in Mombasa — are thought to be among a group of radical Islamists who have found safe haven in the city.
U.S. intelligence agents, sometimes working with local warlords, have carried out counterterrorist operations to nab suspects. “Somalia remains the theater for a shadowy confrontation involving local jihadis, foreign Al Qaeda operatives and intelligence services from a number of regional and Western countries,” says a recent report by the International Crisis Group. The report says the “dirty war between terrorists and counter-terrorist operatives in Mogadishu appears to have entered a new and more vicious stage that threatens to push the country further towards jihadism and extremist violence unless its root causes are properly addressed.”
“There is no official investigation, only a private investigation,” says Mohammed Kanyare Afrah. “There is no law and order here. Everybody is armed, and nobody official can investigate.” Traditionally, Yahya’s clan would exact revenge. But Yahya’s friends are arguing against impulsive, bloody reprisals. It’s that kind of thinking that has destroyed Somalia, they say — the kind of thinking Yahya spent his life trying to eradicate.