It’s a law of nature that ill-feeling and hatred towards your neighbours attract all evils and dubious alliances like extremists. Revenge against your brothers and sisters would lead you to join your tomorrow’s existential enemies. That is the human nature of a tribal society like Somalis.

There is no ideological connection between the Somali villagemen and terrorist groups. It’s a relationship of convenience and conspiracies by both parties with different agendas. Shortly after this marriage of convenience, the hosts of terrorist networks experience abuses and actually become hostages of their guests with no way out back to their  lost freedom. That is to say, they fall as victims of terrorism. Soon, they are robbed of their possessions, and family members – sons forcefully are recruited for terrorist activities, and daughters are taken away under threat without any parental consent and more mistreatment to follow.

When we have no sense of community and neighbourly cooperation, and are divided along clan lines with perpetual warfare, all our enemies, whether they are terrorists or foreign powers, would take advantage of this weakness exactly like what is happening now in Somalia. We can continue blaming Al-Shabab. ISIS, Ethiopia, Turkey, Emirates, or Qatar for our misfortune, but we have to accept the naked fact that it was our own fault that we failed to understand the basic logic that divided we all fall.

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