SOMALIA: It was a rout. After months of fighting that left hundreds dead Mogadishu fell suddenly this week: pick-up trucks with mounted machine guns and young warriors scrambled to leave the city.
The victors broadcast a triumphant announcement that the warlords had been ousted. In their place a relatively disciplined militia promised order and security after 15 years of mayhem. At a victory rally a militia leader, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, made another promise: to create an Islamic state.
Mogadishu is now largely ruled by the Islamic Courts Union, a powerful movement that advocates a strict version of sharia law, including public executions, and has alleged ties to al-Qaeda terrorists. The Horn of Africa, say some analysts, has just acquired its own Taliban.
News of the takeover broke like a thunderclap over Washington.
"This is worse than the worst-case scenarios - the exact opposite of what the US government strategy, if there was one, would have wanted," said Ken Menkhaus, associate Prof of political science and Somalia expert at Davidson College, North Carolina. It has emerged that the Bush administration bankrolled the warlords to gain access to al-Qaeda suspects and block the rise of the Islamic militia.
CIA operatives based in Nairobi funnelled $100,000 (€79,000) to $150,000 (€118,000) a month to their proxies, according to John Prendergast, an International Crisis Group expert on Somalia who has interviewed warlords.
"This was counter-terrorism on the cheap. This is a backwater place that nobody really wants to get involved in, so [ they] thought, let's just do this and maybe we'll get lucky." Instead Washington got burned. Amid recriminations policymakers are asking how did the fiasco happen, and just how bad is it for US interests?
In the vacuum of a failed state Islamic courts were established along clan lines to dispense justice where no other method existed and built up a militia capable of taking on the warlords.
In recent years radicals used the courts to promote the idea of an Islamic state. Cinemas accused of showing immoral films were closed and celebrating new year was made a capital offence.
It is alleged that terrorists became active in the movement. Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, allied to the court leadership, was the most prominent leader of al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, a group linked to al-Qaeda and blamed for a series of bombings in Ethiopia and kidnappings and assassinations in Somalia in the 1990s.
There are rumours that Sheikh Aweys could soon take over the leadership of the courts. If that happens, there is the "very real potential for serious violence", according to a Horn of Africa analyst, as it would pit him directly against President Abdullahi Yusuf, who is against Somalia becoming a fundamentalist state.
An unnamed network run by one of Aweys's proteges, Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, has been linked to the murder of four western aid workers and more than a dozen Somalis who allegedly co-operated with counter-terror organisations. The courts are allegedly protecting three al-Qaeda members indicted in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and possibly the team that staged attacks in Kenya in 2002.
The Bush administration faced a dilemma. It wanted to capture the al-Qaeda suspects but did not dare send US troops back to the scene of Black Hawk Down, the ill-fated military mission.
"The approach - strategy would be too generous a word - was to strengthen [ the warlords'] hand in order to eliminate the threat posed by these individuals," said Mr Prendergast.
In February a group of warlords formed a coalition called Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism and accused the courts of harbouring al-Qaeda. The courts called the alliance American puppets. US diplomats in Nairobi who criticised the warlord payments as short-sighted were ignored and, in one case, reassigned to another country.
Alarmed by Washington's intervention, the militia escalated its operations in recent months, culminating in this week's seizure of the capital.
For the White House it was a humiliating reversal but not necessarily a catastrophe. From their stronghold of Jowhar the warlords are regrouping and talking of retaking Mogadishu.
The Bush administration has offered an olive branch, of sorts, to Mogadishu's new rulers. "In terms of the Islamic courts, our understanding is that this isn't a monolithic group, that it is really an effort on the part of some individuals to try to restore some semblance of order in Mogadishu," said a State Department spokesman. - ( Guardian service)