United they stand: Somalis rally in Mogadishu against a proposal by a weak interim government and the African Union to send peacekeepers to the country.
Photo: AP
Edmund Sanders, Mogadishu
Los Angeles Times
FOR years Abduallahi Mohammed Nur rarely ventured into the Mogadishu streets without an AK-47, which he often used to harass civilians and extort money at checkpoints.
But the 27-year-old hasn’t held his weapon since June, when it was pointed at invading fighters from the Islamic Courts Union. The militia, now known as the Conservative Council of Islamic Courts, drove away the warlord he worked for and confiscated his gun.
Now Nur calls himself a reformed man. Under the watchful eye of Islamist commanders, he says he prays five times a day, studies the Koran and is learning to defend Somalia against foreign threats.
“Most of all,” he said, “they are teaching me how to be good to other people.”
Nur is one of about 3000 former warlord militiamen sent to Islamist-run “rehabilitation camps” on the outskirts of the country’s capital.
It’s an ambitious resocialisation program designed to wean the young fighters off drugs, instil religious values and, eventually, reverse loyalties so they can be integrated into the Muslim fundamentalist forces.
Camp leaders say participation is voluntary and the men are free to leave.
But they admit the camps provide a good opportunity to keep an eye on the former enemy fighters.
After Islamists chased out about 12 warlords who had carved up control of Mogadishu this year, fighters left were given the option to hand in their weapons and return home, or move to the camps to be retrained.
“It’s a difficult job,” said Mohammed Ibrahim Bilal, chairman of one of the new Islamic courts in Mogadishu.
In Washington, there are worries that increasingly Islamist Somalia could end up with a Taliban-style government and serve as a staging ground for terrorist training.
Amid allegations that Islamists are using military advisers from Pakistan and Afghanistan to train soldiers, officials recently began permitting journalists to visit the camps.
But they declined access to weapons stockpiles and insisted on selecting which militiamen could be interviewed, carefully monitoring what they said.
About 20 kilometres north of the capital is the largest of the camps, a Somali national army base before the collapse of Mohamed Siad Barre’s regime in 1991.
After that, rival warlords carved up the Horn of Africa country and largely held sway until an alliance of local religious courts seized control of Mogadishu in June.
The Islamist forces that took the barren compound have cleaned up the trash, built tin barracks and a makeshift mosque, and use the base to stockpile weapons and retrain about 700 defeated militiamen.
Source: Los Angeles Times, Sept 24, 2006
