According to the national security adviser to the president of Somalia, the government of Somalia has deployed thousands of military recruits to neighbouring nations for training to bolster the army for its fight against al-Shabab insurgents.
Hussein Sheikh-Ali claimed that Somalia recently sent 3,000 soldiers to both Eritrea and Uganda in an exclusive interview with VOA Somali on January 26. He stated that 6,000 more recruits would be dispatched to Egypt and Ethiopia.
In a one-on-one interview with VOA in Washington, where he met with U.S. officials to request greater support for Somalia, Ali said, “We hope to finish making 15,000 soldiers ready within 2023.”
The announcement comes as a Heritage Institute for Political Studies (HIPS) report from Mogadishu casts doubt on the government’s ability to reach its December 2024 timetable for having 24,000 soldiers prepared to take over security responsibilities when ATMIS troops are set to depart.
According to the paper, “This timeframe is ambitious because it is unlikely that the Somali security agencies will be entirely autonomous by then, nor is it probable that al-Shabab will have been militarily vanquished.”
According to Afyare Elmi, executive director of HIPS and writer of the paper, “the timetable and the fact the army is in a fight while at the same time they are being rebuilt… we think it’s a tight deadline.” It will be challenging to meet.
According to the article, the Somali government urged ATMIS in November to push back the initial 2,000-soldier drawdown from December 2022 to June 30, 2023.
According to Ali, the reason for the delay is that the personnel Somalia plans to replace ATMIS with are overseas for training. He added that because Somali forces would have to take over the areas that ATMIS troops would leave vacant if military operations against al-Shabab were to be disrupted in central Somalia,
