A member of Somalia's hardline al Shabaab rebel group walks with a machine gun after attending Eid al-Adha prayers inside a football stadium north of the capital Mogadishu November 16, 2010. REUTERS/FEISAL OMAR
Reuters: Failure to pay soldiers threatens Somalia’s war on Islamists
Somalia's inability to pay and even feed its soldiers threatens to undermine years of hard-won military gains against Islamist al Shabaab rebels, with corruption sapping morale and weakening the army in the war against the militants.
In the past two months the al Qaeda-aligned group has stormed an African Union (AU) peacekeeping base and recaptured several small towns from retreating Somali soldiers in Lower Shabelle region south of the capital, Mogadishu.
While no one expects the rebels to regain swathes of territory they lost since AU and Somali soldiers pushed them out of Mogadishu in 2011, there are fears that years of efforts to reform the army may come undone as unpaid soldiers defect, erect checkpoints to extract bribes, or lose the appetite to fight.
Update: Somalia’s war on Islamists threatened by pay dispute -- New Europe
WNU Editor: One word explains all of this .... corruption.
No comments:
Post a Comment