In 1948, the British
colonial government handed over a region overwhelmingly populated by Somalis to
the then emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. When Somalia became independent
in 1960, almost every successive government established its cornerstone foreign
policy by uniting all Somalis, including those in Ethiopia, under one flag. Over
the years, various uprisings occurred and armed groups emerged fighting for the
liberation of what Somalis call “Western Somalia” and the Ethiopians call “the
Somali region in Ethiopia.”
Among the armed
groups was a small religious group of insurgents called the United Western
Somali Liberation Front (UWSLF) led by Ibrahim Hussein “Ibrahim Dheere,” a
cleric who had graduated from the Islamic University in Medina, Saudi Arabia.
Before taking the leadership of the group, Ibrahim was an imam in Seattle in
the United States and was instrumental in co-founding of the Islamic Organization
for Somali Imams. In 2005, Ibrahim was arrested and indicted by the American
authorities for immigration fraud. Putting false statements on his immigration
paperwork was not the only reason for his incarceration; he was arrested on
suspicion of terrorism activities. He was subsequently deported to Kenya and
later left for Mogadishu where he joined the Union of the Islamic Courts (UIC),
which was then ruling Mogadishu. After invading Ethiopian forces ousted the UIC,
Ibrahim returned to Kenya and became a prominent figure in the United Western
Somali Liberation Front.
David Rubincam, a
retired American law enforcement agent, told a Seattle TV channel in 2014 that
Ibrahim, whose real name he claimed was “Mohamed Ibrahim,” was “an extremist
religious zealot of the worst kind” who had been trained in Saudi Arabia as a religious
scholar. According to Rubincam, Ibrahim
was in the U.S. “to raise money through the Hawala system of money transfer to
fund them [terror groups] overseas and to recruit people to their cause to
actually go back to Somalia to take up arms.”
Rubincam was elated
that the government had used the immigration court to expel Ibrahim rather than
charging him with providing material support to terror groups. Many Muslim
activists, who were allegedly involved in terrorism, ended up being deported
from America due to immigration violations. Rubincam added, “The best thing is
to get [Ibrahim] off our soil and get him out of here and never let him come back…I
am 100 percent sure [that he is] a national security threat to the United
States of America or to any country in which he resides.”
Sleeping with the “enemy”
In 2010, Ibrahim Dheere
signed a peace treaty with Ethiopia, which was then led by Meles Zenawi. It was
the same government the cleric had excoriated for being a colonial state, the
enemy of the Somali people, and a major entity responsible for the destruction
of Somalia. Ibrahim’s group was part Islamist in the Salafi persuasion and part
nationalist. It was not a secret that the group was a natural extension of
Somalia’s old Al-Itihad Islamic group. The UWSLF was small in number and had
engaged in bombings and killings in the Somali region under the Ethiopian
occupation.
Ibrahim justified
his move by his desire to seek a peaceful resolution with Ethiopia and to focus
on spreading Islamic teachings in the Somali region. He told an Al Jazeera TV
interviewer both parties thought a peaceful resolution was better than armed
conflict. In another interview, he boasted about getting hundreds of phone
calls from Somali religious clerics congratulating him for signing the treaty.
The Ethiopian Government’s
goals were clear: It wanted to disarm the small militant group, co-opt it, and
send a message to other liberation movements such as the Ogaden National
Liberation Front (ONLF) to negotiate and show Somalis the futility of armed
struggle in general. When journalists asked PM Zenawi about the treaty, he was
quick to denigrate the UWSLF. “They are a small group and they had gotten tired
of fighting,” he said. If Zenawi’s putdown of the UWSLF bothered Ibrahim, he
did not show it to one BBC interviewer. “Don’t believe what is being said in
the press,” he said.
After debriefing Ibrahim
and his colleagues, the Ethiopian Government gave them general amnesty, houses
for the leaders, and a huge plot of land to farm in the agriculturally rich
region of Goday. Taking cues from his bosses in Addis Ababa, the president of
the Somali region, Abdi M. Omar “Abdi Iley”, welcomed Ibrahim and his colleagues
in Jigjiga to celebrate the signing of the treaty. Ibrahim and his cronies
released white doves to signify peace. Men and women sang and danced for the
occasion.
That was in 2010.
Seven years later, there
is little for Ibrahim to show in terms of his group’s accomplishments. He is
currently a graduate student in Malaysia studying languages and is far from
Jigjiga, a city to which he may not return. His honeymoon with Abdi Iley turned
sour. The Ethiopian Government no longer has any use for Ibrahim, but it did
instruct Abdi Iley to reconcile with him. Ibrahim went to Jigjiga and stayed in
a hotel. After waiting for a while, Abdi Iley sent two members of the Liyu
Police—who were former fighters with the USWLF—to interrogate their former
leader. Ibrahim refused to answer any of their questions, and one of them,
according to a reliable source, physically attacked him and would have killed him
had the other police officer not intervened. Was it the classic case of good
cop, bad cop? It is difficult to say, but one thing is clear: Abdi Iley wanted
to humiliate Ibrahim and he succeeded. Shortly afterwards, Ibrahim returned to
Addis Ababa.
Meddling in regional politics
What happened
between Ibrahim and Abdi Iley?
Some prominent
members of the Ethiopian Government, including Prime Minister Desalgam Mariam, tried
to replace Abdi Iley, but failed. Ibrahim and his colleagues were reportedly involved
in the plot, especially his deputy, Ahmed Nashad. Abdi Iley’s attempted demotion
failed because some of the leading Tigrey leaders—among them Aseb Misfin, the
widow of the late PM Zenawi, lobbied hard to retain Abdi Iley.
Sources close to
Ibrahim Dheere adamantly deny that the cleric was personally involved in the
conspiracy. If that is the case, critics say, being oblivious to what his
colleagues were doing shows poor leadership skills. Some of his supporters told
this writer of their disappointment with Ibrahim for several reasons. First, he
continued living in Kuwait after signing the treaty with the government. Second,
he has been absent from the political scene for the past few years even though the
country is going through major political upheavals. Third, Ibrahim and his group
failed to capitalize on the political and economic opportunities given to them.
One supporter said it was mindboggling that the group failed to farm the big
plot they were granted until the land fell into disrepute. Fourth, Ibrahim
failed to articulate his vision after signing the treaty. It is not clear what
the group wanted to accomplish or how. Fifth, Ibrahim’s proclamations of
spreading Islamic teachings in the region backfired after his fallout with Abdi
Iley. Today, the group has almost no presence in the region. Moreover, Abdi
Iley courted Ibrahim’s rivals among the Sufis when he appointed the son of
famous “saint” Nur Kaldhayare as chief of the courts in that region. The appointment
was a slap in the face to Ibrahim and his followers. The Sufis, one source told
me, “are returning to the political scene after many years in the periphery.”
Political views
Ibrahim is more interested
in political activism and fundraising than one typically finds in a Salafi
cleric. To him, money is crucial for achieving political objectives. Most
Salafis focus on speaking about issues of faith, and many have an aversion to
all things political. Not Ibrahim, who is politically oriented. Interestingly,
he has a unique perspective in combining religious sermons in mosques with spearheading
comprehensive educational and health services as part of change. He is critical
of clerics who spend all their time teaching religion and pay no attention to
establishing schools and clinics.
Ibrahim was popular
in the Salafi-controlled Islamic centers in the U.S. for his religious and
political lectures, especially his presentations on the history of the Horn of
Africa. These lectures, some of which are available on YouTube, are hair-raising.
He had a penchant for making unsubstantiated generalizations. He would
summarize an entire decade of Somali history in one word. The Somali civilian
government’s era (1960-1969) was a time of “democracy,” the military regime
that followed (1969-1991) was the age of “communism,” and the period thereafter
was one of “tribalism.”
Ibrahim’s political views are as hollow as his
solutions for rebuilding the Somali nation. For instance, the Somali Youth
League (SYL), which fought for and led the independence movement, was “merely a
product of European colonialism.” These nationalist leaders, Ibrahim argued,
introduced Somalia to new Westernized concepts that are utterly “anti-Islamic,”
such as “gobonimodoon” (freedom
fighting), “waddani” (nationalist),
“loyalty to the country,” democracy, and even the concept of “paying taxes.”
The 1960 Somali constitution, he said, planted seeds for the secularism from
which the country is still reeling. Ibrahim’s solution is for Somalis in the
diaspora to elect a committee and hold a “national conference for salvaging
Somalia” led by none other than the “ulema”
(clerics).
An aborted interview
In a nutshell, I
tried to interview Ibrahim and was able to talk to him briefly twice over the
phone. He was not pleased when I asked him if he was indeed a student in
Malaysia, a fact he had shared with an Al Jazeera TV anchorwoman. “Move on,” he
said. Then, he grilled me to establish whether I favored the treaty he had
signed with Ethiopia or was against it. He also wanted to know if Wardheernews,
the website I write for, is for or against the treaty. I was surprised by his
paranoid line of questioning and told him I only wanted his side of the story
regarding the treaty. Then he asked me to send him all of my questions in
writing, which I did the same day. That was November 4, 2016, and he has yet to
respond to my inquiries. My goal was to know what his treaty with Ethiopia has
accomplished after seven years and what the challenges were. Unfortunately,
Ibrahim chose not to answer. History will tell.
