Somalia is already one of the worst places in the world to be a Christian, with widespread human rights abuses across the country and Christians specifically targeted with being executed – sometimes by beheading, simply for being suspected of being a Christian.

However, the situation has just got worse. In July al-Shabab’s official media outlet the shahada news agency published an article in both Arabic and English entitled Somalia, A Repeat of Afghanistan?. It argued that just as the US government negotiated with the Taliban and after withdrawing its forces in 2021, left it to assume power in Afghanistan, it should now do the same in Somalia.

The al-Shabab article is actually a bid to control the whole of Somalia. In the lawless chaos which followed the overthrow of President Said Barre’s authoritarian government in 1991, Somalia effectively split into three regions, with Somaliland in the north declaring itself an independent (though not as yet internationally unrecognised) state in 1991, while in 1998 clan chiefs in Puntland in the north east declared themselves an autonomous region. Today, whilst the Somali government controls the capital Mogadishu, al-Shabab controls almost all the rural area of south and central Somalia. So, this is a bid by al-Shabab to control the entire country.

Make no mistake, life for Christians is bad in all areas of Somalia. Even in Somaliland and Puntland Christians risk being targeted with honour killings by their clans if they are discovered. While in the capital Mogadishu even expatriate Christians can only meet in secret. However, al-Shabab have made clear that they wish to totally eradicate Christianity from Somalia. They have also followed a similar policy in northern Kenya where they have repeatedly carried out attacks in which Christians are separated from Muslims and then killed – just for being Christians.

The timing of this announcement is also significant, the article was published on the 6 July – less than a week after the UN agreed 30 June deadline for the reduction of African Union security forces in Somalia, which are currently supported by US air power. In fact, the al-Shabab article specifically stated that its strategy for taking over Somalia was to wait until the foreign nations it is fighting lose the political will power to continue saying "Al-Shabab will wear them out with its wait-out strategy."

Now as the African Union forces increasingly hand over security responsibilities to the Somali government, which currently lacks the capacity to enforce even law and order across the country, al-Shabab sees its chance by inviting the US government to engage in dialogue with it. This is a dialogue which in al-Shabab’s view would follow the pattern set by the US negotiations with the Afghan Taliban as it sought to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, i.e. an agreement which would shortly thereafter allow al-Shabab to take control of the whole of Somalia.

Somalia over the last 25 years is actually a paradigm of how a country can quickly slide from toleration to attempted eradication of an entire Christian minority. It is a country where Christians were allowed to openly live as Christians until the overthrow of the authoritarian government of President Siad Barre in 1991. Chaos and lawlessness then prevailed for more than a decade as local warlords and their militias fought each other for control. This led to the emergence of an informal network of shari’a courts known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). These imposed a somewhat brutal form of law and order based on strict enforcement of hudud punishments set out in Qur’an and Hadith, such as amputations for theft and execution for apostasy (i.e. leaving Islam). The actual enforcement of shari’a was carried out by various militias, the most important of which was al-Shabab. In 2006, al-Shabab became an independent global jihadist organisation which by then controlled much of south and central Somalia and by the end of the decade had affiliated itself with al-Qaeda. Within the space of 15 years al-Shabab had created what was in effect a jihadist state in southern Somalia from which it has sought both to eradicate all Christians and repeatedly target Christians in neighbouring northern Kenya.

So, what al-Shabab are actually proposing is that “peace” could be created in Somalia if the US and its allies negotiated with it in a similar manner to their deal with the Afghan Taliban, withdrew all African Union forces – which are already being drawn down – and allowed al-Shabab to control the entire country, including the self-declared independent country of Somaliland in the north and autonomous region of Puntland in the north east.

The consequences of that would be the deliberate attempted eradication of the entire Christian minority from Somalia. 

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