The Security Council has extended the United Nations-African Union operation fighting the Al Shabab jihadists in Somalia by five years, but uncertainties and imponderables abound — including the new funding shocks ushered in by President Donald Trump in January.
The Council voted at the end of December to endorse a new mission, the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (or AUSSOM) with about 12,000 personnel and pronounced colloquially as “awesome.” It will be the test case for an African peacekeeping funding model approved a year ago under Council Resolution 2719.
The resolution provides for 75 percent of financing for peacekeeping missions — though in Somalia’s case, it is more of a war-fighting mission — through UN-assessed contributions, which is intended to put the funding for such operations on a more stable, predictable footing.
But many crucial issues are still up in the air for AUSSOM, which is due to formally launch in July under the new funding model. Before that, in May, the Council must vote again to confirm its approval. Or change its mind.
Back in December, the US deputy permanent representative, Dorothy Shea, abstained on the AUSSOM vote, complaining that the terms effectively meant 90 percent UN financing, not 75 percent. In May, Elise Stefanik, the new US ambassador, might veto it altogether. (She has yet to be fully approved by the US Senate.)
It is unclear how much AUSSOM will cost, but the Institute for Security Studies think tank estimated that annual running costs for its predecessor mission ATMIS (African Union Transition Mission in Somalia) were $1.5 billion in 2023.
Omar Mahmood, a senior analyst for East Africa at the International Crisis Group, says the new Trump administration’s aversion to foreign aid spending is likely to take an even harder position than Shea did under the Biden administration.
“It’s not automatic that this will kick in in July,” he told PassBlue. “I don’t think the funding issue has been resolved but just kicked down the road — everyone should be thinking about contingency plans one way or the other, so we don’t get to a point where we have another funding crunch in a couple of months.”
Trump’s executive order freezing foreign aid for three months is causing panic not only globally — and court challenges pushing back — but also right in the UN system, as the US is the single-largest financial contributor to the organization. But it is not clear what effect the freeze will have on peacekeeping operations generally or on AUSSOM in particular. Washington also has a separate bilateral support arrangement with the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS).
“The Trump administration is likely going to be quite skeptical of funding for AUSSOM, and skeptical in general of the UN peacekeeping budget, particularly on the financing side,” Mahmood said.
“There will be a reassessment of US policy to Somalia,” he added. “There’s frustration on the US side with the FGS and that is going to translate into policy changes, perhaps some form of decreased engagement.” (Somalia is a current elected member of the UN Security Council.)
In the first US military operation launched under Trump’s second administration, the US Africa Command carried out airstrikes in cooperation with the Somali government on Feb. 1 against the Somali branch of Islamic State in which “multiple operatives” were killed. The IS group there, formed as a breakaway from Al Shabab 10 years ago, is largely concentrated in the Golis mountains in the Puntland region in the northeast. The two jihadist groups are fierce rivals.
Trump, who has vowed to end US involvement in wars, posted on his Instagram account a video of the strike as he also messaged: “The message to ISIS and all others who would attack Americans is that ‘WE WILL FIND YOU, AND WE WILL KILL YOU!’”
Ido Levy, an associate fellow with the Military and Security Studies Program at the Washington Institute of Near East Studies, notes the obvious: Trump is difficult to predict.
“It will be significant to see what will follow this pause [in aid]; will the US government continue giving support to Somalia, or will they reduce it,” he said in a call with PassBlue. “If you just look at the rhetoric, it looks like Trump will maybe want to pull back, reduce foreign aid, but it could go the other way. [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio seems to be more interested in not pulling back and in keeping America engaged.”
Any longer-term cuts for UN funding, however, “could impact the US contribution to peacekeeping, whether Somalia or other places,” Levy added. (An email request by PassBlue for a comment from Nick Birnback, UN peacekeeping spokesperson, went unanswered.)
The other major piece of the AUSSOM puzzle to fall into place is its composition. Although the force’s mandate is a continuation in almost every respect of ATMIS’s, one stalwart TCC, or troop-contributing country, Burundi, might pull out, while Egypt might join.
The issue for Burundi is that it regards the pay its soldiers in peacekeeping operations receive as an important source of national income, and it wants to contribute 3,000 personnel to AUSSOM. But Somalia has said it is willing to accept only 1,000.
Burundi is a close neighbor of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the east of the country is embroiled in a brutal takeover by the Rwandan-backed M23 militia.
The other TCCs in ATMIS were Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Djibouti. The continued participation of Ethiopia had been doubted due to a diplomatic spat last year between Addis Ababa and Mogadishu, but Turkish mediation has led to reconciliation.
“I think Ethiopian troops will be part of the mission,” Mahmood said. “I think a lot is still being negotiated because Somalia came up with a framework with the other TCCs on the assumption that Ethiopia would not be there, so now they have to renegotiate troop allocations. . . . There are a lot of moving parts.
“Rapprochement is a good thing because if you don’t have Ethiopia and Somalia on the same page, it provides a vacuum for Al Shabab to operate, especially along their crucial boundary.”
One important contribution Washington has made to the fight against the militia, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda, is the creation and training of the Danab special forces brigade in the Somali military, Levy said.
A force of about 2,000 men, “it’s become very effective, it has been the spearhead of all the offensive operations. They have pretty strong capabilities in taking the fight to Al Shabab. So then the question becomes, how are you going to hold this territory?”
Since the first UN-AU mission in 2007, that task has fallen to external peacekeeping forces. The Somali National Army should eventually step into their shoes, but it’s not ready yet.
Mahmood says the five-year planned lifespan for AUSSOM, “essentially the rest of the decade,” is a crucial opportunity to achieve stability.
“You have a continuation of that UN-AU security blanket, funding challenges notwithstanding,” he continued. “That buys Somalia time to undertake the reforms that it needs to be able to have that mission withdraw successfully at the end of the five years. But it’s going to take a great deal of work.”
The basic issue, Mahmood added, is less one of developing the Somali military into an efficient, properly resourced fighting machine able to contain or even defeat Al Shabab, but more of ending the rivalries that split the country — which is an agglomeration of semiautonomous territories and the FGS in the capital — and starting negotiations with the jihadists.
“For me, politics is at the root of this,” Mahmood said. “If a region and the SFG are going to face off over political issues, they will never be united against Al Shabab, and that gives the movement space to operate. Reconciliation needs to happen on the political side in order for there to be a united, coherent approach, supported by international security forces, to really make progress against Al Shabab. Absent progress on the political front, we’ll be in a very similar situation five years from now.”
Mahmood stressed reconciliation needs to extend to Al Shabab itself. “This is an insurgency that won’t be resolved on the battlefield. At what point do you bring that to a negotiation table? It makes more sense to do that while you have this external security blanket.”
Asked what the Trump administration’s approach to Somalia and UN peacekeeping would be, a State Department spokesperson said in an email to PassBlue: “National security is and will remain a top priority. The review period is a measure put in place for us to align our ongoing work with the America First agenda. The results of the in-depth review will be communicated transparently.”
The Somali security mission comprises the AU troops in ATMIS/AUSSOM and the separate UN Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS), which handles logistics. “What some are arguing is that the 2719 model should only apply to the stipends paid to the troops,” Mahmood said, “rather than also to UNSOS, which is 100 percent funded by UN-assessed contributions right now.”
But the US says the arrangement should be one mission, one budget, and that 2719 should also apply to UNSOS, which would “essentially go from 100 percent UN-assessed contributions to 75 percent. What Washington argues is that if you didn’t do that, and you run the numbers, in effect the entire budget ends up being 90 percent UN-funded rather than the agreed upon principle of 75 percent.”
The problem, Levy said, is finding that other 25 percent. “For many years the EU has been a significant contributor [to the troop stipends] but it hasn’t been confirmed that they’ll continue contributing. . . . It’s going to be very hard to get African countries to contribute; you can maybe get Gulf countries on board, but again what is their interest in doing this?”
Asked for comment, Ed Thicknesse, spokesperson for the British mission to the UN — the country is the penholder for Somalia — referred PassBlue to a statement issued on Dec. 27 in the Council vote by James Kariuki, the UK’s deputy representative.
AUSSOM, he said in part, “will build on ATMIS’s achievements to strengthen stability and security in Somalia,” and the resolution “prepares the ground for the Council to approve a transformative change to the Mission’s financing in May 2025, with the first anticipated use of the framework established by resolution 2719.”
BY: Anton Ferreira
