Fighting erupts along Somalia-Kenya border | | The Bulletin

By Jeffrey Gettleman / New York Times News Service

Published: October 01. 2011 4:00AM PST

NAIROBI, Kenya — Intense fighting erupted along the Kenya-Somalia border Friday as the militant group al-Shabab tried to take back a slice of strategic territory from militias allied with the Somali government. At the same time, al-Shabab fighters are breaking up camps for victims of Somalia’s famine, sending tens of thousands of starving people straight back into drought-stricken areas.

Al-Shabab militants say they will provide enough food to tide people over until the next harvest, expected around January, and some of the people who recently left seemed content with the initial rations of rice, sugar, powdered milk and oil that they had been given. But many aid officials worry that the famine victims are going to soon find themselves in a bleak and barren environment once back in their home villages and that dispersing them will complicate an already strained aid effort.

“This is a nightmare,” said a U.N. official who asked not to be identified because he was criticizing al-Shabab and feared reprisals. “It has been hard enough to access famine victims in Shabab areas, and now that the people have been scattered, that means more checkpoints, more local authorities to deal with, more negotiations.”

It seems that al-Shabab, which has lost several chunks of territory in the past few months, is regrouping to some degree. In August, al-Shabab leaders pulled hundreds of fighters out of Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, calling it a strategic withdrawal, though it seemed more of an acknowledgement that their mostly young and inexperienced troops could no longer go toe-to-toe with a better armed and trained African Union peacekeeping force. The African Union has 9,000 soldiers in Mogadishu to support Somalia’s transitional federal government, whose own army is weak and fragmented.

But in recent days, witnesses have reported hundreds of al-Shabab fighters heading south toward Somalia’s border with Kenya. The border area is controlled by a fractious group of warlords and militias who get covert support from Kenya and Ethiopia and are nominally loyal toward Somalia’s transitional government. On Friday morning before dawn, al-Shabab forces struck Dhobley, a market town jointly controlled by an Islamist warlord and a French-educated intellectual who is trying to form his own mini-state called Azania, an ancient Greek name for the Horn of Africa.

According to Adan Adar, Somalia program director for the American Refugee Committee, a private aid group that assists feeding centers in Dhobley, al-Shabab attacked from several directions, and all sides suffered casualties.

“It was a big fight,” he said. “And it’s likely to impact humanitarian operations because there are many feeding centers in Dhobley.”