Word: puntland
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...Shabaab are a hard-core al-Qaeda group, and they are really establishing a foothold and deepening their bases in Somalia," Nuruddin Dirie, a London-based Somalia analyst and former presidential candidate in its Puntland region, tells TIME. "We knew they would target the government officials, but a hotel setting, targeting the graduating students, it tells us quite a lot about how ruthless, how uncaring this enemy is." (Read how Somalia's fishermen became pirates...
...Somalis] are against the Shabab, but it doesn't seem the government is taking advantage of this by reaching out to clan elders and trying to drain the support from under their feet," Nurudin Dirie, a Somalia analyst and onetime candidate for President of the breakaway Somali region of Puntland, tells TIME...
Monitoring and combating any of these misdeeds is next to impossible - Somalia's current government can barely find its feet in the wake of the 2006 U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion. And many Somalis, along with outside observers, suspect local officials in Mogadishu and in ports in semi-autonomous Puntland further north of accepting bribes from foreign fishermen as well as from pirate elders. U.N. monitors in 2005 and 2006 suggested an embargo on fish taken from Somali waters, but their proposals were shot down by members of the Security Council. (See photos of dramatic pirate rescues...
...pirates almost certainly pay protection to the head of the Puntland, Mohamud Muse Hirsi. Puntland is the region where most of the large "mother ships" that take the small pirate raiders out to sea, are located. For protection from international intervention on land, senior Puntland officials are probably getting a third of the take, or about $65 million...
After stepping down, Yusuf was said to have retreated to his base in the semi-autonomous Puntland region. No one knows his next move. Ethiopian troops, who brought Yusuf into the presidential palace in Mogadishu two years ago, have announced they will withdraw from Somalia in a few days, and so far, there is no obvious candidate who could take Yusuf's place. Nor is there anyone considered powerful enough to united Somalia's ever-divided clans...