AU returns the Middle East and Africa’s most abused stadium to soccer

Al Shabab gunmen in Mogadishu Stadium

By James M. Dorsey

In a sign of improved security in Somalia, African Union (AU) troops will return Mogadishu Stadium, the most abused sports facility in a region with a history of battered stadiums, to the Somali Football Federation (SFF).

The AU decision highlights the recent, significant setbacks suffered by Al Shabab, the Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militia that banned soccer alongside bras, music, movies, moustaches and gold fillings during the years that it controlled large chunks of football-crazy Somalia, including the stadium.

It also celebrates the SFF’s leading role in resisting Al Shabab’s austere lifestyle based on an interpretation of Islamic law that is contested even in jihadist circles and successful campaign to win back child soldiers by offering them a future in soccer.

The return follows a meeting in the stadium earlier this week between commanders of the African Union peacekeepers in Somalia (AMISOM) and SFF officials led by secretary general Abdi Qani Said Arab.

“In December 2010 we held the first edition of regional football tournament in more than 20 years and that tournament had yielded positive results in terms of disarming child soldiers, creating friendship among people and spreading football throughout the country,” Mr. Arab said after the meeting.

Mr. Arab was referring to an SFF campaign backed by world soccer body FIFA and local businessmen under the slogan ‘Put down the gun, pick up the ball” that threw down a gauntlet for the jihadists by luring child soldiers away from them.

"However difficult our situation is, we believe football can play a major role in helping peace and stability prevail in our country, and that is what our federation has long been striving to attain. Football is here to stay, not only as game to be played but as a catalyst for peace and harmony in society," said Shafi’i Moyhaddin, one of the driving forces behind the campaign, in an interview last year.

Mahad Mohammed was one of hundreds of children the association assisted in swapping jihad for soccer, the only institution that competed with radical Islam in offering young populations a prospect of a better life.

“People were afraid of me when I had an AK-47; now they love and congratulate me. I thank the football federation, they helped me. I just drifted into being a soldier; it is hard to say how it happened. Some friends of mine ended up being fighters and they used to tell me that it was a good and exciting life and much better than doing nothing or being on the streets. After I spent some time doing that, I understood that it wasn’t like that at all and I was happy to get out.” Mahad said.

The SFF hopes to host in December a soccer tournament for the first time in more than two decades in the 70,000-seat stadium that was built with Chinese aid in the 1970s and once was the region’s largest sport facility.

The tournament would symbolize Somalia’s fragile retreat from the brink following a string of military defeats by Al Shabab at the hands of the African peacekeepers and Somali military. Al Shabab last month lost control of its last urban outpost but still has a foothold in southern and central parts of the country. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud became in September the first Somali president to be elected by parliament and inaugurated since the country slipped into civil war in 1991.

Mogadishu stadium, occupying strategic ground in the northern part of the city, has since been controlled by a host of militias, including Al Shabab which used it for training and public executions until last year when the AU established its command headquarters in the facility.

As a result, the facility topped the list of abuse of stadiums that bear the scars of the battles fought on their terrain in a swath of land stretching from the Gulf to the Atlantic coast of Africa in which militants and autocrats use stadiums for their own purposes.

In Iraq, deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's sadistic son Uday humiliated national soccer team players in Baghdad’s Stadium for the People when they failed to perform. US and Iraqi forces discovered mass graves in several Iraqi stadiums since the overthrow of Saddam.

Syrian security forces have in the last 20 months herded anti-government protesters into stadiums in Latakia, Dera’a and Baniyas. The use of the stadiums evoked memories of the government's 1982 assault on the Syrian city of Hama to crush an earlier uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in which at least 10,000 people were killed. A 1983 Amnesty International report charged that the city’s stadium was used at the time to detain large numbers of residents who were left for days in the open without food or shelter.

Christian militia men responsible for the 1982 massacres in the Beirut Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla to which Israeli invasion forces turned a blind eye converted a local soccer pitch into their staging ground.

Egyptian stadiums were for years the venue of pitched battles between security forces and militant soccer fans who refused to concede control of a space they considered their own to a regime they increasingly saw as brutal and corrupt.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Awlaki’s death highlights Yemeni president’s increasing irrelevance

Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh recuperating from wounds in Saudi Arabia

By James M. Dorsey

If the killing of US-Yemeni jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki highlights the increasing marginalization of Al Qaeda, it also weakens embattled Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s effort to cling to power despite six months of anti-government protests that have brought his country to the brink of civil war.

Mr. Saleh, who returned to Yemen last week from three months of treatment of severe wounds he suffered during an attack in June on his presidential compound, has sought to portray himself as the only obstacle to Al Qaeda grapping power in the Red Sea geo-strategic country straddling Red Sea. In recent interviews, he has asserted that his departure would bring the Muslim Brotherhood and with it Al Qaeda to power in Yemen.

Mr. Awlaki’s death compounds the major body blows Al Qaeda has suffered in the past ten months with the killing in May by US Navy Seals of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and the Arab revolt sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.

It also significantly reduces Mr. Saleh’s controversial role in the fight against an increasingly weakened Al Qaeda.

US diplomatic cables disclosed by Wikileaks detail the president’s willingness to allow the US to conduct a military campaign against Al Qaeda on its territory as long as he could maintain plausible deniability because of overwhelming public opposition to foreign operations on Yemeni territory.

At the same time, the cables discussed Mr. Saleh’s failure to provide agreed anti-terror training to Yemeni airport officials, permitting of cargo to pass through x-ray machines unchecked and refusal to act on US suspicions that several Yemeni Islamic institutions were Al Qaeda recruiting grounds.

Few doubt that Mr. Saleh has repeatedly manipulated the terrorist threat in Yemen and played both ends against the middle to curry US and European favor. Powerful dissident military commander Brigadier-General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, the head of the first armored brigade who defected to the protesters in March, has gone as far as charging that Al Qaeda’s Yemeni affilitate to which Mr. Awlaki belongs was a creature of Mr. Saleh’s making to secure Western military and economic support.

From a US perspective, Al Qaeda has been weakened to a degree that it can risk Mr. Saleh being succeeded by a government that at worst would be as unreliable and duplicit an ally as he was.

The peaceful mass anti-government protests that toppled Egyptian and Tunisian presidents Hosni Mubarak and Zine el Abedine Ben Ali, brought the autocratic regimes of Syrian president Bashar al Assad and Mr. Saleh to the brink of demise, and only morphed into a civil war in Libya after ousted Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi employed his armed forces highlight the rejection of Al Qaeda’s militant Islam and indiscriminate violence by a majority of Middle Easterners and North Africans.

Mr. Awlaki’s death may well strengthen a growing belief that Al Qaeda has been reduced to a local threat in the three areas where it still retains a presence of any significance: Yemen with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) that suffered a serious blow with the departure of the Yemeni-American cleric, Somalia where Al Qaeda affiliate Al Shabab has been forced to surrender territory in recent months and Algeria where Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has largely limited itself to harassing Algerian forces.

Increasingly, western counterterrorism officials and analysts are coming to the conclusion that the body blows dealt to Al Qaeda render it incapable of launching large scale, dramatic attacks of the kind it perpetrated in the last decade such as the 9/11 targeting of the World Trade Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, the 2005 and 2007 attacks on public transport in London and Madrid and the bombings of multiple targets in Casablanca, Amman and Saudi Arabia. The attacks in Arab cities moreover played a key role in diminishing Al Qaeda’s public appeal in much of the Muslim world.

Western counterterrorism officials stop short of declaring victory in their more than a decade-old fight against Al Qaeda. Yet, the organization they are fighting today is but a shadow of what it was at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

Mr. Saleh’s inability to leverage his cooperation in the hunting down of Mr. Awlaki to reduce US, Western and Saudi pressure for his resignation after 33 years in office was evident with the Obama administration’s reiteration of its insistence that he step down in the same breath as acknowledging his part in the death of the Yemeni-American.

US and European diplomats are nudging Mr. Saleh behind closed doors to agree to a transition plan under which he would step down within a maximum of 30 days in exchange for immunity from prosecution for himself and members of his family.

Mr. Saleh’s contribution to the killing of Mr. Awlaki may amount to little more than standing aside and letting the US do the dirty work. In doing so, he may have highlighted his increasing irrelevance rather than his importance. Mr. Saleh’s successors will not need the perception of a terrorist threat to secure international assistance in rebuilding their crisis-ridden country.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.