Somali forces inefficient and corrupt: UN report

The Somali government's military forces are ineffective and corrupt, despite international assistance, and it remains dependent on foreign troops for survival, UN experts concluded in a report. The Monitoring Group on Somalia also said in its report to be presented to the UN Security Council this week that Eritrea continued to support armed Islamist groups fighting the Somali government in violation of an arms embargo.
"Despite infusions of foreign training and assistance, government security forces remain ineffective, disorganised and corrupt," said the report.
Somalia's internationally backed Transitional Federal Government has been boxed into a tiny perimeter in the capital Mogadishu by an insurgency launched in May 2009 by the al Qaeda-inspired Shebab group and its more political Hezb al-Islam allies. The Shebab now control most of the centre and south of the Horn of Africa country, which has embroiled in a virtually non-stop civil war since 1991.
The UN group said "the military stalemate is less a reflection of opposition strength than of the weakness of the Transitional Federal Government."
It described government forces as "a composite of independent militias loyal to senior government officials and military officers who profit from the business of war and resist their integration under a single command." The UN group said last November the government had about 2,900 operational troops, although it could also count on the support of some militias Mogadishu thought to number between 5,000 and 10,000 fighters.
However, the UN group concluded that the Somali government "owes its survival to the small African Union peace support operation AMISOM, rather than to its own troops."
AMISOM currently has roughly 5,000 Ugandan and Burundian troops, who fight back nearly daily attacks on the Somali government by Shebab militants. The report also concluded that in 2009 "the government of Eritrea has continued to provide political, diplomatic, financial and - allegedly - military assistance to armed opposition groups in Somalia." The support violated a 2008 UN Security Council resolution that tightened an arms embargo and other bans on armed groups in Somalia.
"By late 2009, possibly in response to international pressure, the scale and nature of Eritrean support had either diminished or become less visible, but had not altogether ceased," it said. The UN Security Council last year December slapped an arms embargo and sanctions on Eritrea for aiding Somali rebels. The report also found that "arms, ammunition, or dual-use equipment continue to enter Somalia in violation of the general and complete arms embargo imposed in 1992, at a fairly steady rate." Primary sources of this supply remained Yemen and Ethiopia, it said.