Issue No. 415

Somalia’s Security Sector in Broken: here’s how the new government can fix it (Part 1)

When the general is weak and without authority; when his orders are not clear and distinct; when there are no fixed duties assigned to officers and men, and the ranks are formed in a slovenly haphazard manner, the result is utter disorganisation.

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Over the past two weeks, Somali security forces have scored a number of major victories over Al-Shabaab. In late June, Danab special forces mounted a surprise offensive in Hirshabelle state, catching the militants offguard with a rapid series of raids on known strongholds between Jowhar and Matabaan. Further north, near the remote village of Baxdo in Galmudug state, a combination of local defence forces known as macawiisley and militias from the Sufi Ahlu Sunna wal Jama’a (ASWJ) movement killed more than 70 members of Al-Shabaab who tried to capture the settlement on 17 June. These constitute arguably the most serious setbacks inflicted on the jihadists in more than five years.

Somalia’s security sector expanded dramatically under the administration of President Mohamed Abdillahi Farmaajo, fuelled by billions of dollars of external assistance. Indeed, Somalia now has far more security personnel than it realistically needs or could possibly afford: over 53,000 at the federal level and roughly 23,000 more distributed between the Federal Member States (FMS).  And these figures don't even take into account the 20,000 ATMIS troops still in-country or the 22,500 more SNA planned under the AU's 'force generation' component.

The Somali National Army (SNA), built largely with European and American support, alone numbers more than 25,000. In addition, Turkey contributed a special forces brigade, known as Gorgor, with more than 5,000 highly trained personnel, and a 1,200-member paramilitary police unit named Haram’ad – both equipped with modern Turkish weapons and equipment. Qatar poured resources, training and equipment into the National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA), which now possesses approximately 10,000 armed personnel (including more than 5,000 recruits trapped in Eritrea). 

Despite these formidable numbers, only one major government offensive operation has been staged against Al-Shabaab in the past five years (the inconclusive Operation Baadbaado in 2019) and most of the country, including almost all major roads, remains outside government control.

So, what has suddenly changed? Why have 500 Danab commandos and a mob of ill-trained and poorly equipped militia been able to inflict more damage on Al-Shabaab in the past two weeks than 20,000 SNA, 5,000 Gorgor and thousands of police and NISA paramilitaries managed to achieve over the past five years? 

The answer, quite simply, is political will. The Farmaajo administration’s inner circle was dominated by his Chief of Staff (later his intelligence czar), Fahad Yasin, together with a clique of Salafi Islamists – many of them former jihadists – who perceived Al-Shabaab as a competitor rather than as a threat. In 2018, with the help of Eritrea, Farmaajo started a dialogue with Al-Shabaab that established a tenuous truce, while Qatar nudged both sides towards formal negotiations.

In the meantime, Farmaajo and Fahad re-oriented the Somali security sector to subjugate the FMS and suppress political rivals instead of fighting Al-Shabaab. Farmaajo appointed loyalist cronies and underqualified flunkies to key security posts, politicising the senior leadership and short-circuiting the formal chains of command. Bloated with hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid and a small army of foreign consultants, the security sector swelled into an enormous self-licking ice-cream cone and any pretext of a counterinsurgency campaign fizzled away into an episodically lethal game of “capture the flag.”

Within days of taking office in May 2022, HSM announced that he would resume the fight against Al-Shabaab. Danab’s rapid deployment for operations in the Shabelle valley is a clear signal of this new political will and the termination of any tacit understanding between Villa Somalia and the jihadists. But Danab alone cannot restore security and stability to Somalia: the full weight of the national security establishment must be brought to bear. 

For a start, the new Commander-in-Chief can no longer rely upon the same crop of hidebound, housebroken service chiefs to miraculously deliver better results than in the past. A comprehensive overhaul of the military, police and intelligence leadership is essential. Holdovers from Farmaajo’s regime, especially former members of Al-Shabaab, should be vetted and purged before they can do any more damage.

Reform of the security sector must not be limited to the fight against Al-Shabaab: the new President and PM should take a much longer-term view of Somalia’s strategic priorities, laying the foundation for a professional, capable security sector that is right-sized, affordable, and configured to address Somalia’s future national security threats. For that to happen, they need to undertake a critical review – a ‘Red Team’ assessment - of the assumptions, plans and institutions they’ve inherited, resist pressures to double down on vested interests and poor past decisions, and appoint new service chiefs who can understand and adapt to the challenges of 21st century warfare.

Another major challenge will be to rein in and rationalise a security sector whose growth has inflated completely out of control. The May 2017 ‘Security Pact’ between Somalia and its donors envisaged 18,000 personnel for the army and 32,000 for the police, beyond which (according to World Bank projections) they would represent an unsustainable burden on the national budget. Instead Farmaajo encouraged the SNA to balloon to nearly than 30,000 troops, and the police to 37,000 – of which more than half are on the federal payroll.

Adding to this unsustainable debt burden, NISA has quietly acquired a private army of nearly 10,000 troops in violation of the Provisional Constitution and outside any recognisable chain of command. Although the existence of small, highly specialised units like Gaashaan and Waran may be justified within NISA’s mission, Duufaan’s paramilitaries and the goons of the People’s Defence Forces (modelled on General Mohamed Siyaad Barre’s Guulwadayaal, or ‘Victory Pioneers’) should be stood down with immediate effect and their personnel either distributed to other units or demobilised altogether.

Rationalising, ‘right sizing’, and reorienting Somalia’s security forces to their mission are just the first steps in cleaning up the mess that Farmaajo and his cronies left behind. Restructuring them along federal lines and embedding them in a comprehensive, integrated “whole-of-government” security framework is also critical if the new government’s political will is to be translated into durable results on the ground.

And in the near-term, a way must also be found to harness the potential of local militias and community defence forces, like those that crushed Al-Shabaab at Baxdo last week but which, on paper at least, do not officially exist - a topic that will be addressed in the second part of this editorial.

The Somali Wire Team