MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Somalia’s powerful Islamist movement on Sunday distanced itself from Osama bin Laden’s view that deployment of troops to the Horn of Africa country was part of a crusade to crush budding Islamic rule.
“Osama bin Laden is expressing his views like any other international figure. We are not concerned about it,” Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, the moderate former leader of the Islamist group told reporters in Mogadishu.
The purported audio recording by bin Laden warned the United States and other countries against dispatching troops to Somalia where Islamists control the capital Mogadishu and have sought authority across the country.
Bin Laden urged Somalis to back the Islamists and to fight Somali interim President Abdullahi Yusuf and his allies, warning that offering any support to Yusuf or international forces would turn Muslims into “infidels”.
But Ahmed said that bin Laden’s call was his own personal view and not that of the Islamists who ejected secular, U.S.-backed warlords from Mogadishu on June 5.
Source: Reuters, June 2, 2006
