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Abdoulkader Adan, a former military leader of the Afar rebel movement during the 1990s, has gone back to his first love. He, along with about ten of his comrades, has joined the wing of the Front pour la Restauration de l'Unité et la Démocratie (FRUD, rebel movement) which still advocates armed struggle against the regime of President Ismaël Omar Guelleh. During the early 1990s Adan was the deputy commander of the rebel movement's northern front, before succeeding Ali Maki as head of FRUD military operations at the end of 1997. The Djibouti authorities had accused him of instigating the attack at the end of July 1999 on a national army barracks in Medeh, on the Mabla Mountain 50 km north west of Obock.

Adan relinquished arms after the peace agreement signed in 2001 between the FRUD's then leader, the late Ahmed Dini, and the Djibouti government. Since then, the Djibouti government has been paying him a regular salary to keep him quiet. But he would seem to have changed his mind with the approach of the presidential election in April 2011. Moreover, a dozen Djibouti nationals of Issa (the clan of Saad Moussa, Odahgob and Fourlaba) extraction also joined the FRUD in the last two weeks of 2010. Finally, this rebel movement has embarked on a campaign to recruit young Afars in the north of the country, sometimes voluntarily but sometimes by force.

All the signs are that the FRUD rebel movement wants to form a small task force to carry out military actions ahead of the next election.