Meanwhile, the Telegraph reports Islamists digging in near the southern town of Jilib where fleeing residents reported heavy artillery and gunfire.
Officials from Somalia's weak transitional government, which now holds sway over Mogadishu, said they would leave open the offer of peace talks with the ICU providing that they surrendered. "We are contacting them for dialogue. We have repeatedly asked them to come to Mogadishu to talk," Mr Gedi told reporters, adding that the foreign fighters now constituted 65 per cent of the Islamist force.
PINR's latest analysis of the situation in Somalia predicts the Islamic Courts may well mount a guerrilla war in the south, but they will be one of many forces vying for control of Somalia. Moderates who supported the Islamic Courts will no longer support the movement for now having no desire for guerrilla war. PINR predicts that Somalia's recognized government is no stronger than it was. Ethiopia is predicted to be leaving soon with the result of re-emergence of clan militias fragmenting political power and a return to status of a failed state.
Prime Minister Gedi has eliminated his major rival Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan, who had attempted to broker a reconciliation agreement between the T.F.G. and I.C.C. Nonetheless, the rise of Gedi to a central position for the moment does not betoken the emergence of a strong central government in Somalia. The Ethiopians will withdraw and the T.F.G. will not have the power to prevent political fragmentation.
Addis Ababa has accomplished its own mission in Somalia, which was to eliminate the threat of an Islamic state on its eastern border, and is content to leave the country in a condition of political weakness. Having leagued with the warlords and Puntland militias, as well as the T.F.G., in its campaign against the I.C.C., and needing to mend its relations with Somaliland, which is resistant to unification with the T.F.G. and has serious border disputes with Puntland, Addis Ababa is unlikely to give whole-hearted support to Gedi. Since Somalia launched an unsuccessful irredentist war against Ethiopia in 1977 to gain control of the latter's ethnic-Somali Ogaden region, Addis Ababa has striven to keep Somalia fragmented and to play factions off against one another. Addis Ababa has not changed that strategy and should not be considered the T.F.G.'s reliable patron.
Understanding the I.C.C.'s aborted revolution is facilitated by the trenchant analysis of Somali intellectual Dr. Abdishakur Jowhar in his article, "A War of Miscalculation," published on the website Hiiraan Online. Commenting on the I.C.C.'s declaration of jihad against Ethiopia and its aggressive moves in mid-December to challenge Ethiopian forces based around the T.F.G.'s provisional capital Baidoa in the south-central Bay region, Jowhar writes: "They threatened Ethiopia and stirred the wasp's nest, but they have not bothered to prepare themselves with protective clothing. They had the guts, the belief, the belligerence but not the arms, the organization or the depth of pocket necessary for waging war (jihad) against Ethiopia. They believed their own rhetoric of god being on their side, of representing all Somalis, of having already taken over and centralized the whole power of the nation in their hands."
As Jowhar sees it, the I.C.C.'s leadership got carried away with itself and succumbed to a triumphalist illusion that led them to throw "young bodies armed with weapons not much better than spears and a prayer against the well oiled fully equipped Ethiopian meat grinder." As do many Somali intellectuals, Jowhar epitomizes his analysis in a Somali proverb: "The tree lamented that the axe with wooden handle would not have been able to cut it down if part of it was not in the axe."
[...]Three possible scenarios present themselves for the new chapter in Somalia's political history. The most unlikely is that the T.F.G. will unify Somalia south of Puntland in an effective central government; its clan-based constitution is an inherent weakness, and the many sub-clans are in a mode of self-protection. More likely is a return to the pre-I.C.C. period of extreme decentralization, warlordism and state failure, either with or without an Islamist insurgency -- the latter being the more probable outcome.
External actors will revert to their previous positions, with regional states playing off Somali factions against one another to their own perceived advantage and Western powers drawing back from the scene, unless an Islamist insurgency becomes a base for international Islamic revolutionaries. Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, has said that massive humanitarian, reconstruction and development aid from Western powers is required for Somalia's stabilization, but that is unlikely to come in sufficient quantities.
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