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On the Horn of Africa, Somalia is strategically adjacent to the Red Sea, Suez Canal, and vital commercial waterways, and with neighboring Sudan is valued for its potential oil and gas reserves that America, China, India and other nations covet. In December 2006, Washington-backed Ethiopian forces unseated the governing Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), installing a Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in its place. Thousands were killed. Over a million became refugees.
The Ethopians withdrew in January 2009 following an agreement between the TFG and the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS) - a UIC coalition with other opposition forces - yet fighting continues with America backing TRG/African Union forces to keep Islamists from regaining power. UIC members aren't terrorists or connected to Al Qaeda. They're freedom fighters, struggling to liberate their country and end years of conflict, divisions and instability.
As James Petras explained:
"The UIC was a relatively honest administration, which ended warlord corruption and extortion. Personal safety and property were protected, ending arbitrary seizures and kidnappings by warlords and their armed thugs.
The UIC is a broad multi-tendency movement that includes moderates and radical Islamists, civilian politicians and armed fighters, liberals and populists, electoralists and authoritarians. Most important, the Courts succeeded in unifying the country and creating some semblance of nationhood, overcoming clan fragmentation."
Mogadishu traders initially set it up to bring order to the city's insecurity and end clan divisions after years of instability, civil war, and no stable government in most parts of the country.
Al-Shabaab and other opposition forces continue the struggle. Stratfor, a leading online geopolitical intelligence publisher describes it as follows:
"After Ethiopian forces beat back the Supreme Islamic Courts Council (SICC) in 2007, (its) armed wings dissolved into the ungoverned savannah in the south, (and) the Mogadishu underground and safe zones in central Somalia. They eventually re-formed under the leadership of Aden Farah Ayro....and Sheikh Hassan Turki....assumed the name al Shabaab and sought to continue the fight against the new Somalian government and its Ethiopian backers with an insurgency-style approach. Portions of al Shabaab have also been known to call themselves the Mujahideen Youth Movement (MYM)."
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