Monday, June 12, 2006
Associated Press
Baidoa, Somalia, June 12 (AP) – Islamic militiamen who just seized Somalia’s capital moved on another town on Monday in at least 50 vehicles mounted with machine guns, apparently intent on a new battle with their secular rivals.
Witnesses said the militiamen also transported mortar guns to Jowhar, 90km northeast of Mogadishu, the last stronghold of their severely weakened opponents.
If militiamen capture Jowhar and consolidate power in Mogadishu, they will control nearly all the major towns in southern Somalia.
Northeastern Somalia is under the control of a semi-autonomous government and has seen relative peace in the past 10 years. Central Somalia is not under the control of a particular group and has seen some inter-clan violence, but nothing on the scale of what has happened in Mogadishu.
Last week, the Islamic militiamen took control of Mogadishu after months of fighting that left more than 330 people dead, many of them civilians.
One of the secular warlords vowed Sunday that the battle for Mogadishu was not over. However, it was unclear how many fighters and weapons the defeated alliance had, and many of the US-backed warlords remain in hiding.
Mogadishu has been relatively calm since the Islamic militias took control. For its residents, relief over an end to fighting is mixed with uncertainty as to the intentions of their new rulers, who have vowed to rule by the Quran. US officials have accused the fundamentalists of harbouring al-Qaeda terrorists, fuelling fears Somalia could become a Taliban-style haven where extremists thrive and liberties suffer.
Saturday, Islamic militiamen broke up World Cup viewing parties by firing in the air and cutting electricity to theatres. Sheikh Abdukadir Ali Omar, whose Islamic Courts Union controls the fighters, said that was a way to prevent “corrupting the children in this Muslim community.”
The Islamic Courts Union is a fragile alliance of radical and moderate Muslim groups from different clans. On Saturday, its leader, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, denied that he wanted to impose a Taliban-style government and said no one in his organisation had connections to al-Qaeda.
With the retreat of the warlords, the main counterweight to the Islamic Courts Union is Somalia’s weak transitional government, formed last year.
Somalia has been without effective government since 1991, when largely clan-based warlords overthrew longtime dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then turned on one another.
Now many of those warlords are members of the transitional government, while the Islamic leaders portray themselves as a force capable of restoring order and setting Somalia on a new path.
The transitional government has made little progress toward asserting any authority in the country. It sits in the southern city of Baidoa, because Mogadishu is considered unsafe.
Monday, lawmakers in the transitional parliament began debating whether to allow in peacekeepers from the regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development group, or IGAD, a proposal the government has been considering for months even as the security situation deteriorated.
The Islamic Courts Union chairman, Ahmed, told the British Broadcasting Corp’s Somali service on Monday that Islamic militias would oppose any peacekeepers entering Somalia.
IGAD is set to have an unscheduled meeting on Tuesday in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, to discuss developments in Somalia.
Louis Michel, the EU’s commissioner for development and humanitarian affairs, is also scheduled to hold meetings on Tuesday in Nairobi with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, the current chairperson of IGAD, and transitional President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed.
On Friday, the US said that it had invited European and African countries to a meeting in New York this week to discuss how to deal with gains by the Islamic militia in Somalia.
Source: AP, June 12, 2006
