Waagacusub.net - According to reports, the warring sides exchanged gunfire and pounded each other’s positions in Kalabaydh, Saaxdheer, and Kalshaale area using Grad rockets and artillery guns on Saturday night.

In northern Somalia, radical tribal secessionist group (Somaliland) is facing a vigilante backlash from Khatumo’s unionist armed young men with nothing to lose. Amid the renewed optimism of this teenage uprising are fears it could push a troubled northern region closer again to civil war. SSC freelance journalist reports exclusively from a region ripped apart by violence.

Today before I landed in Saaxdheer, Khatumo security forces made a gruesome discovery in one of the city's suburbs. After a tip-off, Khatumo army carried out a dawn raid on ten squat buildings by the sluggish valley - that ribbons through the city. Under a hail of bullets, they swooped on a secret stronghold of Secessionists (Somaliland Militiamen), the secessionists group that has terrorized Saaxdheer, and the whole of SSC regions, for the past seven years. During the gun fight, the troops killed 25 Secessionists members, wounding scores more. 

Abbdikariim Hassan, a local journalist, arrived on the scene shortly after the shooting finished. He helped search the warren of underground tunnels the Secessionists (Somaliland militiamen) had dug beneath their base. "We found bodies with their hands tied together, their throats cut," he told me. "Piles of bones; decomposing flesh. On the shelves of the huts, there were jars and containers full of blood that made us think that Somaliland militia had cannibalized the bodies. Down towards the valley, we came upon shallow graves. It had been raining and as the water flowed over the mud, skulls were exposed." Another mass grave, another dark chapter in the history of one of the world's newest and most brutal -separatist organizations (Somaliland). 

I travelled to Laascaanood, capital of Sool region in Somalia's isolated northeast, Seven years to the day after the violent revolt with which northern tribal secessionists (Somaliland) announced its invasion. I'd just spent weeks meeting local traditional tribal leaders, local Human Rights Watch and other NGOs. They described SSC regions as a warzone, with the –northern tribal secessionists (Somaliland) and the Khatumo security forces locked in an intractable battle, heaping atrocity upon atrocity, blood soaking into the desert sands. 

Maryam Haji Yusuf, a Laascaanood NGO founder, said that her organization had had to curtail a project tracking violence in SSC regions as the security situation deteriorated. "We couldn't expose our people to that kind of risk," she told me. "The place is a security vacuum." The northern secessionists bombed busy marketplaces, and slaughtered schoolchildren.

 Amid the carnage, I'd also heard a solitary note of hope in the shape of a vigilante Khatumo young security forces the UJTF (Unionists Joint Task Force). These squads of young men, were fighting, and occasionally beating, the northern tribal secessionists militiamen (Somaliland). "Hope, some said, had returned to the Khatumo State regions, and the first time in years, borne on the young dervish shoulders of these freedom fighters vigilantes” she concluded. 

By: Haboon Haji Abdi-Buuhoodle, East Africa University

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