NAIROBI – A mil­i­tary of­fen­sive has dri­ven So­ma­li­a’s al Shabaab Is­lamist group out of ma­jor strong­holds and de­prived it of rev­enue sources, but its re­treat to a south­ern val­ley and north­ern hills still poses a threat, the U.N. en­voy to So­ma­lia said.
The African Union’s AMI­SOM peace­keep­ing force and So­mali sol­diers have pushed the group, which wants to top­ple the West­ern-backed gov­ern­ment, into smaller pock­ets of ter­ri­tory since launch­ing an of­fen­sive last year.

But the group has con­tin­ued to strike Mo­gadishu and other gov­ern­ment-held ar­eas with bomb and gun at­tacks from bases in the south­ern Juba Val­ley and in north­ern Punt­land’s Gal­gala hills, a re­gion out­side the African Union’s area of op­er­a­tion.

“The AU-U.N. have just done a bench­mark­ing re­view of AMI­SOM and the So­mali na­tional army, as well, and cer­tainly they have recog­nised that Punt­land is an area of con­cern,” U.N. en­voy to So­ma­lia, Nick Kay, told Reuters on Wednes­day.

He said ex­pand­ing AMI­SOM’s re­gion of op­er­a­tions to the semi-au­tonomous re­gion of Punt­land was “un­der ac­tive con­sid­er­a­tion”, with­out say­ing when it might be agreed.

The So­mali gov­ern­ment has said that the Juba Val­ley, which lies in the far south near the strate­gic Kismayo port, was the next tar­get for the mil­i­tary of­fen­sive, but has not said when.

Punt­land, which has been slowly draw­ing closer to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment in Mo­gadishu, has agreed to in­te­grate 3,000 of its forces into the So­mali na­tional army, Kay said.

On the po­lit­i­cal front, Kay said So­ma­lia was lay­ing the ground­work for a re­vised con­sti­tu­tion, al­though prepa­ra­tions had been de­layed, and for par­lia­men­tary and pres­i­den­tial elec­tions in 2016. He said it was still not clear whether they could be on the ba­sis of one per­son, one vote.

He said the gov­ern­ment was com­mit­ted to a process that is “more in­clu­sive and more rep­re­sen­ta­tive” than in 2012, when el­ders chose par­lia­men­tary law­mak­ers for their com­mu­ni­ties and law­mak­ers then chose the pres­i­dent.

One op­tion would be to ex­pand the num­ber of peo­ple choos­ing the pres­i­dent to in­clude el­ders, civil so­ci­ety, wom­en’s groups and oth­ers, he said, adding it was up to So­ma­lia to de­cide.

“We should not worry if the time that it needs to be re­ally ce­mented takes a bit longer than had been orig­i­nally an­tic­i­pated,” Kay said.

“This is a coun­try fac­ing many prob­lems and chal­lenges, but they are the prob­lems and chal­lenges of a coun­try com­ing to­gether, rather than falling apart.”

U.S. Sec­re­tary of State John Kerry, on a sur­prise visit to So­ma­lia on Tues­day, ac­knowl­edged the coun­try’s progress and said the United States would start the process to re-es­tab­lish a diplo­matic mis­sion there.