The
Islamic State of Somalia is a country in the Horn of Africa and one of the two theocracies that currently exist in the world, alongside Vatican City. Formed out of the former British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland, Somalia gained independence in 1960 as decolonization swept across Africa and the British Empire. Initially seeming stable, a military coup in 1969 ousted the democratically-elected president and installed Mohammad Siad Barre as president. Barre would leverage Somalia’s position in the calculations of Cold War planners in both Moscow and Washington as well as the precarious clan politics of his country for twenty-three years. Siding first with the Soviet Union, Barre's failure to incorporate Ethiopia's Ogaden region into his country in the 1970s resulted in Somalia shifting allegiance to the United States. However, the tapering off of the Cold War in the early 1990s led to Washington withdrawing vital financial support for Barre's regime and the dictator fell in 1992, his country collapsing into anarchy shortly after. United Nations forces, lacking both troops and logistical support from any of the five Security Council forces (each declining to intervene for varied reasons), failed to restore order and forces withdrew in January 1994 as Somalia became one of the most dangerous places in the world
—and one of the few countries with no effective central government.
With international attention focused on the Congo and West Africa, Somalia spent more than five years as effective no-man's-land and leading to a massive diaspora of Somali people that continues to a lesser extent today. That changed with the arrival of the Islamic Union of Somalia (
al-Itihaad al-Islamiya as-Sumal or IIS), a hard-line Islamic fundamentalist militia that grew out of local
Sharia law courts that had sprung up in the vacuum to administer justice. IIS slowly gained a toehold in the southern part of the country and in 2000, launched a lightning offensive that resulted in the collapse of independent regimes in the regions of Puntland and Somaliland, the latter having declared itself independent following Barre’s ouster.
The imposition of a religious theocracy based on extremist interpretations of Sunni Islam, mixed with the traditional xeer legal system of Somalia, has led to a unique, if highly anti-democratic, regime. It is regularly regarded as one of the "least free" nations in the world in terms of personal freedoms, and the willingness of the government in Mogadishu to harbor suspected terrorists with ties to fundamentalist Islamic groups has led to it being isolated internationally, with several countries refusing to recognize it as the legitimate government of Somalia.
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