[MarkSheppard]

Will do.

By the way, a lot of what the Duchess wrote above is basically assumptions and a lot of reading between the lines, to try and construct a coherent narrative out of the limited information available to her.

Link to thread 1

The Islamic Court Unions, as typical for their expectations and overall goal (which is not the stability of Somalia, but conquest) fly the Black Flag of Jihad, black bearing the takbir in white.

In recognition of this, the following support has definitely been provided by other nations of the Islamic Ummah:

Djibouti: Military uniforms and medical supplies.

Egypt: Military training at Bal'ad north of Mogadiashu, in cooperation with the Eritreans and Libyans, to 3,800 troops of the ICU.

Iran: Sent three aircraft loads of machine-guns and M-79 grenade launchers, with ammunition, along with medical supplies and the service of three medical doctors. A large dhow also arrived at el-Adde on the 17th of August carrying 80 MANPADs with copious ammunition for them.

Hezbollah: The Islamic Courts Union sent 720 men to fight as a volunteer battalion with Hezbollah against Israel in the conflict over the summer. These men were reputedly combat veterans of al-Qaeda operations in Afghanistan against our troops there. In exchange, Hezbollah served as a broker for the ICU to obtain additional supplies from Syria and Iran.

Libya: Provided training, funds, and sent several military aircraft to Somalia (It is possible these were still there, and the target of Ethiopian airstrikes against the Somalian airports), along with at least one consignment of arms.

Eritrea: One shipment by a heavy trading dhow (~200 tons burthen) of AK-47 assault rifles, PKM machine-guns, RPG-7s and ammunition. A second shipment by dhow of anti-aircraft guns, and a third shipment, by an Antonov transport, also of anti-aircraft guns. Volunteers from the Muslim Oromo Liberation Front which operates in Ethiopia against the government, and from Pakistan, arrived in Somalia on another dhow from Eritrea to join the ICU forces (75). Beyond these shipments a total of 2,000 regular Eritrean troops were dispatched to Somalia to form a strong backing cadre for the Islamists' tribal levies.

Saudi Arabia: A C-130 loaded with medicine and foostuffs was sent from Saudi Arabia to Mogadishu in June. In August around 320 volunteer jihadis arrived from Saudi Arabia along with seven truckloads of food and ammunition, probably shipped by dhow from the Saudi Red Sea coast.

Syria: In July, 200 ICU fighters were shipped to Syria for training in guerrilla warfare tactics.

Foreign volunteers:

The number of foreign volunteers stretches the whole of the Islamic world. There are estimated, discounting those listed above which were apparently dispatched by government efforts, around 8,000 jihadis from foreign countries in Somalia with the support of the ICU. Many of these are veterans of heavy combat against our forces in Afghanistan, and may include some of the old Arab cadres of Osama bin Laden who survived the US invasion in 2001 but were forced to flee, and are veterans of combat against the Soviet Army in the 1980s.

The largest numbers, however, are not Arabs, but rather Pakistanis, usually having crossed the Indian Ocean on trading dhows, though a sizeable quantity of Pakistanis of British citizenship or naturalized status are included in these forces, and perhaps as many as twenty of these have been captured in action by the Ethiopian Army during its advance.

In total:

1. 8,795 jihadis, 795 dispatched by governments and 8,000 independently arrived.
2. 2,000 Eritrean regulars.
3. Up to 720 trained Islamists who have combat experience against Israel (this category may overlap to some extent with 1.)
4. 3,800 local levies trained by Eritrean, Libyan, and Egyptian officers in Somalia.
5. 200 locals trained in guerrilla war tactics in Syria.
6. A number of medical specialists to provide a combat medical service for the Islamist army.

In short, the Islamists went into the conflict with around 15,500 trained fighting troops, most of them veterans of heavy combat against modern armies (or the Ethiopians). The rest of their force was tribal lashkars. It appears at this moment that only these troops have provided any serious resistance to the impetous of the Ethiopian advance. The tribal lashkars have defected or collapsed and fled generally at first onset; it is the foreign fighters and the heavily trained locals and probably outright Eritrean army units which have fought and held to the bitter end.

This also should quash any doubts about the ICU in Somalia being anything other than a growing hive for terrorism exactly like the Taleban in Somalia.

Link to thread 2

The Islamic Regime in Somalia reported to collapse.

Islamists fleeing from the capitol.

Islamists begin to hand their weapons over to the clan leaders, indicating a very serious collapse, as they're not attempting to leave to conduct guerrilla warfare.

And finally, the leadership of the ICU resigns. They phrased their message, encouraging the Islamists everywhere to secure strong-points for the sake of order, as suggesting to me that they plan guerrilla operations against the Ethiopians.

What is clear however is that even my wildest dreams about the Ethiopian operations have been exceeded here. The Ethiopian Army is limited only by supply in how fast they can arrive in Mogadishu; the old warlord of Jowhar (no definite indications on the status of that city yet) thinks by tomorrow they'll be in the capitol; I doubt that, but with only limited pockets of foreign fighters, often surrounded, providing any kind of resistance, they will be there soon.

The question is what happens next in Somalia. For the first time, the transitional government may actually have authority over up to one-fourth of the country's territory, and the whole capitol besides, if the clans of Mogadishu do not try to organize their own resistance, which seems now quite unlikely.

The biggest thing here is that the Ethiopians have shown that they have fully digested the lessons of the Border War and have whipped their army into a surprising degree of competence, perhaps as the best fighting force in Africa. This campaign was conducted professionally as a sophisticated maneouvre operation which used mechanized forces to chop the Islamist forces into a series of disconnected and leaderless pockets. It appears that in most cases the Islamist units simply collapsed as word spread that Ethiopian tanks were in their rear areas.

The Eritreans are not happy campers today, as this makes the Ethiopian reoccupation of the disputed regions from early this year something that they cannot reliably contest by force of arms, and paints bleak any conflict against Ethiopia they might have to fight.

I would not call the Ethiopians a modern army in any sense, on account of the weakness of their opposition, but they certainly have at least reached an early-WW2 level of tactical sophistication.