Somalian strife

Ethiopian-backed troops loyal to Somalia's interim government are reported to be within 30km of the capital Mogadishu, with plans to besiege it and force the capitulation of the hitherto ascendent Union of Islamic Courts. Events have moved so rapidly in the last week - until Christmas Eve government forces were still ostensibly holed up in the provincial town of Baidoa as they had been for months - that even if the UN joins the African Union in condemning the decisive Ethiopian military presence they will be forced to deal with a fait accompli. The successes of the UIC, an Islamist alliance of sharia courts and their militias who swept across most the country after securing Mogadishu in June, had raised Western and regional concerns that Somalia would propagate destabilising jihad, but in the short term the UIC united much of what was for 15 years a failed and atomised state. This fragile stability, needed now more than ever in the aftermath of heavy rains and catastrophic flooding in November, has, however, almost certainly collapsed with loathed and largely Christian neighbour Ethiopia the real power in the land.

Addis Ababa is risking an oppotunistic Eritrean incursion into Ethiopia itself if its already demoralised army finds controlling Somalia a tougher task than conquering it. The rosiest senario sees the interim government accomodating some of the structures and members of the UIC, avoiding an Islamist insurgency and a return to chaos, and allowing the resumption of suspended airborne aid operations to the shattered south. The mounting humanitarian disaster, affecting 1.8 million people across the region, may yet force the warring parties into talks, as it perhaps did when they met in Djibouti on 3 December. But the very real danger of a devastating regional conflagration is closer than ever.