A one-time base of Dervish zealotry, the Republic of Somalia was sown by the federation of an Italian colony (Italian Somaliland) and a British protectorate (British Somaliland) on July 1, 1960.
Thirty-one years of autocracy later, a once promising nation gave way to our present-day Somalia; a chaotic, burned out, liquid slag of a country, besieged by breakaway states, self-declared independent republics, periodic foreign invasions, brutal militias and a heaving, havoc-making, barbarous militancy stretching beyond its borders.
The main government, the Federal Republic of Somalia, claims jurisdiction over almost all of Somalia, but in reality, controls only its capital, Mogadishu, and a scatter of army bases within its Outland protected by strung out, ineffective African Union forces.
Its South is managed by a Kenyan-financed puppet state called Jubaland. Its North is divided up between four "independent" breakaway provinces preying on each other's turf. Its coasts are inundated with harbor gangsters and pirates. Its center is a no-go no-man's-land of depravity and desolation terrorized by a wild and especially vicious jihadist group, the Al-Shabaab.
Little has improved over the last decade, despite many disaster-laden, multi-nation attempts. A country born of despair within which Perses, the Titan god of destruction, has been given free reign to roam it.
