Word: islamists
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Hussein Mohammed Aidid is still getting used to his transformation from warlord to Somalia's Deputy Prime Minister. But his assessment of the precarious hold the new government has on Somalia, after ousting an Islamist regime, is both candid and grim. "The institutions of the T.F.G. [Transitional Federal Government] are very weak," Aidid says in an interview with Time at his villa in Mogadishu. "It is a symbolic government. Permanence we do not have. We do not have institutions, we do not have a credible force. Unless [we receive outside assistance] quickly, we have no chance of building a nation...
...Somalia's future hangs on whether the new government can achieve that reconciliation. Since the collapse of the last functioning government in 1992, Somalia has been a prisoner of bloody anarchy, a void filled by vicious and impressively armed chaos, as rival warlords, clans and sub-clans and Islamists prosecuted a series of civil wars - over power, over historic tribal animosities and over competing visions of Islam. Last summer, the Islamist Courts Union - an alliance of clerics and clan leaders - took over Mogadishu and forced the warlords out. In the last two weeks, the T.F.G, backed by thousands of troops...
Mohammed Hussein Farah Aidid is still getting used to his transformation from warlord to Somalia's Deputy Prime Minister. But his assessment of the precarious hold the new government has on Somalia, after ousting an Islamist regime, is both candid and grim. "The institutions of the T.F.G. [Transitional Federal Government] are very weak," he said in interview with TIME at his villa in Mogadishu. "It's a symbolic government. Permanence we do not have. We do not have institutions; we do not have a credible force. Unless [we receive outside assistance] quickly, we have no chance of building a nation...
...involvement of outside players, however, the Somali conflict remains a domestic power struggle at heart. It pits the Transitional Federal Government, a product of years of painstaking horse-trading among rival clan warlords, against the Council of Islamic Courts, a loose Islamist alliance strongly nationalist in character - which has vowed to break the power of the warlords and unite all of Somalia under Sharia law (although it happens to be led by clan rivals of the dominant clan in the government camp...
...equally unlikely that Ethiopian military power will subdue the Islamist challenge inside Somalia. Indeed, the government's reliance on forces of the old enemy is unlikely to endear it to the Somali citizenry. Although Ethiopia promises to withdraw its forces within days, they had been active in Somalia for months before their presence was officially acknowledged, and a speedy withdrawal would leave a vacuum that the Islamists would once again fill. Yet having effectively repelled an Islamist advance on Baidoa, the Ethiopians risk losing much of their tactical advantage if they tried to capture Islamist strongholds, particularly the capital. Their...