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Background: The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) is an armed insurgency movement seeking to break part of Harerge - the ethnically Somali province of Ethiopia known to the Somalis as the Ogaden, after the Ogaden Plateau area - away from Ethiopia and to unite it with Somalia (essentially that part of Somalia which was Italian Somaliland). Ostensibly, the ONLF has portrayed itself as an independence movement.
The ONLF has links with al-Mhad al-Islami, the Somali Islamist terrorist and insurgency group, which is part of the al-Qaida network, and has conducted paramilitary operations with al-Ittihad. As well, the ONLF has worked with the support of the administration of the semi-autonomous Somali area known as Puntland. Equally, the ONLF has supported Puntland leader Col. Abdullahi Yussuf in his hostilities against the Republic of Somaliland.
The ONLF has received military training, weapons and other assistance from the governments of Fritrea, Libya, and Egypt, and various al-Qaida groups.
The movement stems from a Soviet-backed Somali irridentist movement originally designed to undermine the stability of Ethiopia before 1974, when it was a major ally of the United States. However, when the Dergue overthrew Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, the Soviets withdrew their support for the Ogaden movement and supported the Dergue Government of Ethiopia in defeating a Somali attack on the area in 1978.
The ONLF formally came into being on August 15, 1984, as a movement for the independence of the Ogaden region of Ethiopia.
The collapse of the Dergue in 1991, briefly ended hostilities between the ONLF and the Ethiopian Government, now in the hands of the Tigré People's Liberation Front (TPLF).
The ONLF then became a legitimate member of Ethiopia's Transitional Government in the early 1990s because the Transitional Charter provided nationalities the right to self-determination. The ONLF's continued push for self-determination, however, created tensions with the ruling EPRDE Ethiopian security forces began to crack down on the organization by launching an attack on February 22, 1994, in the Ethiopian town of Wardheer (Warder) to capture former ONLE Chairman Ibrahim Abdallah Mohamedin. Many civilians were reportedly killed during the attack....