By Aydid Guled.
Somali Top News.
“Research” and “Consultancy” and “Analyst” are some of the most abused trades in the Horn of Africa. Armed with some “English” and diverted donor funds, mercenaries such as Matthew Bryden pitch tent in the Horn of Africa and engage in the destabilization of the states in the Horn guised as researchers, consultants and analysts. As mercenaries, there is nothing stopping them from being hired by anyone with some good cash to harm the other one. As a result of overplaying their hands, especially on social media, lots of different people have started asking the right questions about their activities and motivations.
In their November 11 issue of “Somali Wire,” they are ranting about Sovereignty for the right reason. As its through sovereignty that Mercenary Matthew Bryden and his behemoth commercial espionage vehicle, SAHAN Research have been facing dwindling profits, threatening to drive them out of business in their criminal enterprise. A court in Somalia had found Matthew Bryden guilty of espionage charges and sentenced him to a jail term of several years, in absentia, while declaring his privately-owned commercial espionage firm out of bounds in Somalia. The sad thing for Matthew Bryden and company is that, whoever assumes Somalia’s leadership in the elections that have been long coming, it can only get worse for him from here. And nothing scares him and his fellow mercenaries more as seen from their panicky reactions: his lamentations and resignation as he poured his heart out on the Elephant and Somali Wire.
Since SAHAN (Espionage) Research learned to infringe on the sovereignty of Horn of Africa states with or without detection, so have Horn of Africa states learned to use sovereignty with or without one. And since mercenaries at SAHAN (Espionage) Research continue hiding in plain sight trying to camouflage their subversive activities inside Somalia, Horn of Africa states too have been shone the light on them to expose them for the ugliness of their cruel enterprise.
Mercenaries are, by adaptation, filthy opportunists in their internal wirings. Aging SAHAN (Espionage) mercenaries, no longer unable to hide themselves because of thrashings and trashing from the current administration in Somalia and for draining the swamp on them, have started wiring themselves up to fight for relevance. From “Somali Wire” in recent months, they now got “Ethiopia Cable.” There have already emerged obvious forecasts that, as opportunistic anarchists, it’s only a matter of time before they start “wiring up” other Horn of Africa states as they have done with Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan.
True to form, they had already publicly sounded their doomsaying, about Kenya by predicting electoral-related violence in 2022. Because they have been wrong about their predictions of doom in Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan, they will be wrong about Kenya. For anarchists, peace and stability means less or no profit. Since they thrive in chaos, they either create one, contribute to it or exaggerate it.
As in the case of the pot calling the kettle black, so is Matthew Bryden and his SAHAN mercenary outfit mouthing others on human rights abuses while they continue being forces for bad in the Horn of Africa. For anyone who, openly or secretly, sides with, supports or sympathizes with any party to a conflict in which both parties are responsible for atrocities against non-combatants/civilians is guilty as the warring sides. Only judging from their warmongering in the public domain, SAHAN mercenaries are as culpable of rights abuses as ENDF and TPLF. What they do under the darkness of secrecy is definitely worse. It’s worse that they are paid for their atrocious work.
Sadly, for SAHAN Espionage and Mercenaries, the answer to their self-fulfilling following questions which they asked in their November 11 issue of “Somali Wire” is an emphatic YES:
And they ask: Can it credibly claim sovereignty?
1. “If a government is illegitimate in the eyes of its *people (post-coup Sudan, post-2007 and 2017 elections Kenya, post-2021 elections Ethiopia, Uganda, and Tanzania.
2. If a government that has become even more acutely indebted in the wake of economic slowdown caused by COVID-19 pandemic and which relies on international loans and/or grants.
3.If a country is unable to cover its own bills (which is the case for much of Africa) in terms of its security and economy,
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSS!, they can and they do it all the time!
Somalia’s international partners refused to ride Matthew Bryden’s rage and vendetta against the nascent Somali government. Because they are not anarchistic and short term about Somalia as Mercenaries would be, it’s insulting to the US and UK to bring down a whole government or play highhanded game with it for the expulsion of UN diplomat who can be promoted and posted anywhere in the world. The principle of proportionality is not something a mercenary would be amenable to. The US, UK and other like-minded international partners, who Matthew Bryden is unfairly flogging for their lenience on Somalia administrations, know very well that they brought Somalia from very far with heavy investments in its dangerous and arduously protracted peace and statebuilding process. If Somalia’s traditional partners didn’t mean well for Somalia, like Mathew Bryden and his intricate web of mercenaries, they would have followed his advice and thrown the baby with the bath water.
No amount of donor handouts and loans for infrastructure, security, democratization and human rights can take away SOVEREIGNTY from African states. It doesn’t make a difference that it’s what SAHAN Mercenaries wish and live for. In fact, none of the P5 countries or EU want to take away SOVEREIGNTY from the recipients of their aid, be it loan or grants! Thank goodness SAHAN Espionage is not a P5 member state and Mercenary Matthew Bryden its president. That is when the world would have seen what a dictator and what repression it was capable of.
About SAHAN Espionage’s whipping itself over the membership of UN Human Rights Council, let them keep lashing out. It’s their “body.” The architects of the world body, UN, had a purpose for it and its been serving its purpose—plus, minus. And if the qualifications for either the Security Council or Human Rights Council were pegged on “excellent record of preserving human rights,” there will be no institutions to talk about. From the standards set by the mercenaries at SAHAN Espionage (making it legitimate for rebels to take up arms and overthrow governments as they publicly lobby for in Ethiopia and Somalia), then the threshold to declare a state human rights violator is pretty lower to live out any member of the P5.
What Matthew Bryden wants is chaos, which explains his unrealistic prescriptions and public support for rebel groups and violence against the people the rebels see as threat or enemy. Which is why we tell Matthew Bryden and his SAHANA Espionage, “HANDS OFF OUR SOVEREIGNTY.” “ The sovereignty of Horn of Africa states is inviolable.”
Current Somali Admnistration (Nabad & Nolol) Finally Got Matthew Bryden Broken and Exposed, to His Destructive End!
What has been held at the realm of speculations by many and for certainty by only a few privileged individuals can now be officially confirmed from the horse’s mouth. That Mr Matthew Bryden is guilty as charged. How ironical that his personal admission came through his attempts at denial.
Through an emotional essay, Matthew Bryden of SAHAN RESEARCH and UN Monitoring fame, bared to anyone who cared to know that his activities in Somalia have been more than pervasively subversive against Somalia’s business, political and government elites. Oh, poor Bryden.
As a result of constant pressures coming to him from Farmaajo’s administration, culminating in his guilty verdict by Somali courts, Matthew Bryden couldn’t holdback any more. He succumbed! It came by way of an essay he published on The Elephant, today, 8 November 2021. His mask (identity not Cavid-19) came off.
FGS failures are well known to all who interest Somalia politics, including Farmaajo himself— and includes all of what Mr. Bryden has mentioned in his sour grapes essay. However, where Mr Bryden went wrong is when he allowed himself to be overcome with raw emotions.
But by going after Fahad Yasin, whom he presumes as the author of his personal and his company’s misfortune in Somalia since 2018, and Farmajo’s owner, Matthew Bryden inadvertently dropped all his guards, at a moment of emotional breakdown, to expose the true nature of his activities in the Horn of Africa in general and Somalia in particular.
In his uncontrolled emotional fit against someone who he has taken as his personal and business foe, Matthew Bryden ended up hurting through his ill-will, the majority of Somalia’s political elite who happen to share almost similar personal and political history with Fahad Yasin. Which means, by “spilling the beans” on his foe, Fahad Yasin, Matthew Bryden “spilled the beans” on every of Somalia’s political big wigs and their close allies, burning all his bridges in the process.
Without exception, Matthew Bryden inadvertently dug what he considers as dirt on all of Fahad Yasin’s bird of a feather. Matthew Bryden’s assertions (spooking on) against Fahad Yasin basically touches on and feels like a roll call of the who’s whom of Somalia’s political class.
They include, Ahmed Madobe, Said Deni, Sheikh Sharif, Abdirahman Abdishakur, Ali Haji Warsame, Dahir Mohamud Gelle, Abdikarim Guled, Farah Sheikh, Ahmed Ali Fiqi, Odawaa, Nurdin Dirie, Mohamed Abdirizak, Adan Shirwa Jama, and almost every Somali who was between the ages 17-30 in the 1990s, and the next generation of teenagers in the following decade. As when it comes to Islamists, Somalis are either infected or affected.
Mr Bryden reserved his worst indignation and ridicule for opposition presidential candidates with his praise for the great job Fahad has done to transform NISA.
“Fahad has transformed NISA from a decrepit, thuggish secret police force into a modern, capable intelligence service and the secretive core of Villa Somalia’s power.” This factual assessment of Mr Bryden is the worst indictment, in writing, by a foreigner against president Hasan Sheikh. That he ran and left behind NISA as “decrepit, thuggish secret police force” which Fahad later transformed “into a modern, capable intelligence service.”
Already too battered by Nabad iyo Nolol’s aggressive posture for survival, Mr Bryden’s tantrums-filled essay could turn out to be his most strategic mistake after his mistake to take-on Farmaajo, thinking that he can get away with it as he did get away with his attacks against Hasan Sheikh’s administration. From having Farmaajo as his enemy since proscribing him and his company from Somalia, now, as a direct consequence of his essay, Matthew Bryden unnecessarily made himself the broadest of foes from a pool of Somalia’s potential leaders in the near future.
It’s highly doubtful after this that any of the leading presidential candidates will reverse Farmaajo’s administration’s sanctions against Matthew Bryden and his company, if they ever come to power. It won’t help that Matthew Bryden and his company acted as pro bono consultant for the council of presidential candidates, ASWJ and anti-Farmaajo FMSs. Because he trashed everyone of them with this essay of his, especially the part where he went personal against Fahad Yasin.
All because it’ll now be clear to them what Mr Bryden’s work had been in Somalia: spying and profiling Somali business, cultural, politics and government leadership. That what he said about Fahad, he must have said about each one of them before and will say about each one of them if they takeover the reigns of government. They know all too well that yesterday he was on Hassan Sheikh and Tuuryare, today he on Fahad and Farmaajo’s case, and tomorrow he will be on anyone of them who ascends to power! That’s is his job. And he says, “it’s not espionage.”
Excerpts from Mr Bryden’s Essay with analysis:
Anyone directly or indirectly described in the following paragraphs, will he left enraged by Matthew Bryden’s essay as it will confirm to them the dangerous nature of his and his company’s clandestine activities in Somalia. They now know how expensively they have been paying for consultancies on draft statements in English! Like the Somali pride who publicly called out the hunter lad who tried to lay her over a leg of dikdik, when her husband paid 100 camels as dowry, they will now call Mr Bryden out for his over priced draft English statements.
After this essay, a lot of Somali opposition politicians will start asking themselves the right questions: why is Mr Bryden risking so much in Somalia? Why should he be so involved in Somalia? Why is he so adamant in doing business on Somalia? Can’t he go back and find work in his country? Why is he acting more Somali than the Somalis when all he has been doing, which he also did in this essay, is to set Somalis against each other on religious factions and clan lines and setting Somalia against its neighbors?”
1. Some of the country’s largest telecoms and financial institutions were found non-compliant with due diligence standards and even minimal anti-money laundering/countering terrorist financing best practices, enabling Al-Shabaab to make routine use of their services – including highly irregular transactions that should have raised red flags. The FGS, for its part, makes little or no effort to enforce its own regulations in this regard. (This affects almost all Somalis and is criminal of Mr Bryden to espouse).
2. While Fahad was carving out a career for himself in the aftermath of Al-Itihaad’s 1997 defeat, the movement’s other alumni had divided into two wings: one, asserting that Somalia was not yet ripe for jihad, pursued political and economic interests, while advancing the core tenets of Al-Sahwa’s radical ideology by establishing an underground organisation (tanzim) and by preaching (da’wa). They called themselves Al-I’tisaam. The other faction, unwilling to abandon the path of jihad, sought out foreign fields of battle on which to hone their beliefs and skills. (The first part of this paragraph, Mr Bryden affects the majority of Somalia’s political and business elites)
3. Farmaajo was not an Islamist, but from Fahad’s perspective, this rendered his candidate even more useful. During his studies abroad and exposure to members of other Islamist groups, Fahad had apparently internalised a practice more commonly associated with Shi’a Islam: taqqiya – the use of deception and dissimulation in defence of the faith, which Sunni jihadists have pragmatically appropriated in recent decades. Farmaajo’s secular profile, his ultranationalist populism, and his American passport, complemented by an entourage of technocratic cabinet ministers from the diaspora with Western accents and stylish suits, would help to camouflage Fahad’s real ambition: an Islamist coup.”
(Every Islamist will find slighted and exposed by this last paragraph, turning them into Mr Bryden’s enemies the moment they read or hear of his incriminating essay. For example, Said Deni will see himself in this. That, as with Fahad, Nr Bryden is making guilty of “Taqqiya” putting on a deceptive show with his dancing in public, his fake love for music, his pretense to supporting abortion, his anti-islamic clerics posturing and all that just to camouflage his past Jihadi orientation).
4. “Bringing Al-Shabaab into government would also solve another wicked problem that many Western governments feel strongly about: AMISOM. Integrating jihadist fighters into the Somali security sector would obviate the need for an international peace enforcement operation. Bilateral train-and- equip missions for Somali security forces might continue far into the future, but the enormous cost and commitment required to sustain the AU mission would finally come to an end.” (If this is the case, why is Mr Bryden jittery about reconciliation with Al Shabaab? For personal economic reasons to sustain his war economy. What’s also clear from here is his loath for AU/AMISOM because of conflict of interest-related business contract issues.)
HOW THE ETHIOPIAN CONFLICT EXPOSED MERCENERIES LIKE RASHID ABDI OF SAHAN RESEARCH.
Below excerpts from Ambassador Tibor Nagy(himself a “mercenary” in his right’s article on Ethiopia-Eritrea war is a big indictment on cyberwar/people like Rashid Abdi on both sides of the conflict— in it for the pay like mercenary Rashid, or passioned members of affected ethnic groups.
“This week the Ethiopian Government admitted bombing Mekelle, the capital of rebellious Tigray province, just hours after aggressively denying it had done so. This escalation in the war in Ethiopia’s north comes almost one year after Tigrayan forces started the conflict with a premeditated attack on the Ethiopian army’s northern command. (The scenario was very similar to the Confederacy’s attack on Fort Sumter that started the American Civil War.)”
Amb. Nagy’s likening of TPLF to the confederates and his parallels of Fort Sumter and Northern Command attacks, puts the Tigray conflict in proper perspective for Americans in which case Abiy wins or gets the benefit of the doubt.
“In addition to fighting on the ground, the conflict has engendered a massive social media war among the large global Ethiopian diaspora. While not involving bullets, this “warfare” is just as vicious, hateful, and vitriolic – spreading rumors, exaggerations, and ethnic hatred. Instead of promoting an end to the conflict, this cyberwar is fanning the flames, including within America’s Ethiopian population.”
(Cyberwar, like the one Rashid Abdi is paid to fanning its flames, is contributing to the horrific humanitarian crisis and violations against human rights in all the regions which the Ambassador mentioned in his article.)
In the article, Amb. Nagy also starkly refers to the two parties as TPLF and Ethiopia. This recognition that the conflict is between a rebellious (Nagy’s own characterization of TPLF) group and Ethiopia is slap in the face for Rashid Abdi’s stupid paid narrative about the conflict.
The unchecked madness of Sahan research will create more and new crises in East Africa after the Horn of Africa region.
It was “Somalia Wire” and today Mercenary Group SAHAN Research has introduced “Ethiopia Cable.” It’s a matter of time before this mercenary outfit publishes “Kenya Chronicles” from Tanzania before moving to another capital to start publishing, “Tanzania Trails,” all the time fomenting discord in HOA/EAC region by supporting dissident groups against governments.
Isn’t it fantastical for Tigray activists and paid lobbyists to demand a UNSC-mandated no-fly zone over Tigray when TPLF is fighting to march to Addis Ababa?
Isn’t it ironical to solely blame ENDF and Abiy over Tigray conflict and humanitarian crisis when TPLF is claiming to have killed, as reported by on ground NPR reporter, “tens of thousands of ENDF and allied ethnic militias?”
Don’t governments have right to defend its territories against internal and external aggression?
Who gave a non-state armed actor the right to take up arms against a legitimate government and not the other way round? Mercenaries don’t give a damn. They think they have nothing to lose. They are in it for for the business. The riskier it is the better their returns!
THE OWNERS OF SAHAN RESEARCH MUST BE PUT TO ACCOUNT FOR THEIR COMMERCIALIZATION OF VIOLENCE.
This article has been featured on the Somali Top News website at different times on the same subject. You can visit their site at www.somalitopnews.com.
