38 Killed in Renewed Somalia Fighting

[Vulture6]

38 Killed in Renewed Somalia Fighting

Thursday, May 25, 2006


MOGADISHU, Somalia — Fighting between rival militias intensified Thursday in the Somali capital, with battles spreading across Mogadishu and at least 38 people dead and 90 wounded, medical sources and a militia commander said.

The latest fighting comes despite a May 14 cease-fire between Islamic militias and a rival alliance of secular warlords, who have been vying for control of the city. Witnesses say the fighting has spread from northern Mogadishu, which had been the scene of fierce battles in recent weeks, to the southern and eastern parts of the capital.

Reports from the Somali capital's main hospitals said at least 30 people were killed Thursday. Ali Mohamed Siyad, leader of an Islamic militia, said his group had lost eight combatants.

In addition, Medina Hospital said it had received 60 injured people and Keysaney Hospital 30.

Witnesses said Islamic militiamen had also taken over a key hotel that is owned by a member of the rival Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism.

The Islamic militiamen drove the warlords away from an area of southern Mogadishu, where the Sahafi Hotel is located, resident Saidia Mohamed said.

"The battle is continuing, I'm talking to you from under my bed and you can hear sounds of heavy gunfire and mortars," a panic-stricken Mohamed said, speaking on her mobile phone.

On Wednesday, the rival militiamen renewed fighting in northern Mogadishu for a few hours during which at least six people were killed and another six seriously wounded, witnesses and medical workers said.

More than 140 people — most noncombatants caught in the crossfire — were killed in eight days of fighting in Mogadishu earlier this month.

Somalia has been embroiled in some of the worst fighting in more than a decade in recent weeks.

The fundamentalists portray themselves as capable of bringing order to the country, which has been without a real government since largely clan-based warlords overthrew longtime dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.

The Islamic militia's growth in popularity and strength, and the possibility that they have outside support, is reminiscent of the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the late 1990s.

The secular alliance, which includes members of a U.N.-backed interim government but acts independently of it, accuses the Islamic militiamen of having ties to Al Qaeda. The Islamic group accuses the secularists of being puppets of the United States.

Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, president of Somalia's near-powerless transitional national government, told The Associated Press earlier this month that he believes Washington is supporting the secular militia as a way of fighting several senior Al Qaeda operatives who are protected by radical clerics in Somalia. He called on Washington to instead work only with his government.

[Vulture6]

Surge in Fundamentalist Warlords in Somalia Raises Concerns
Thursday, May 25, 2006

NAIROBI, Kenya — A surge in the power of Islamic fundamentalist warlords in Somalia is raising fears that the Horn of Africa nation could follow the path of Taliban Afghanistan into the hands of Al Qaeda, despite Western efforts to stop it.

Similarities with pre-9/11 Afghanistan abound: strict Islamic courts, public executions, strong anti-Western sentiment and a failed central government. As in Afghanistan, fundamentalists are winning public support by promising a chaos-weary public that they'll impose order.

Wary of the threat from so-called "failed states," the United States has boosted its presence in the Horn of Africa. The Pentagon placed a military task force in Djibouti, just north of Somalia.

The Bush administration has avoided direct action in Somalia — perhaps because of the failures of the last intervention in the early 1990s, including the deaths of 18 servicemen in a 1993 battle made famous by the book and film "Black Hawk Down."

But U.S. efforts to influence Somalia indirectly through proxies are now stirring debate and angst even among secular-minded Somalis.

"I believe in the idea of fighting the terrorists, because terrorism has no room in Islam, the religion of peace," said Osmail Mo'alin Ahmed, a teacher in Mogadishu, where frequent battles are erupting between secular militias and those allied with Islamic extremism. "But the U.S. should not place such a responsibility with ruthless warlords."

Musse Sudi Yalahow, a secular warlord and commerce minister in Somalia's near-powerless central government, said Somalia is critical ground in the war on terror and that's why he has joined an anti-terror alliance.

"Somalia must not be another Afghanistan or a transit point for terrorist attacks in neighboring countries," he said. Fighting between his Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism and the Islamic fundamentalists, known as the Islamic Court Union, has left more than 220 people dead since March in two major battles for control of Mogadishu.

Yalahow declined to answer when asked if he had received U.S. financial support, but broadly asked for it.

"I call upon the U.S. government and the international community to support our alliance's bid to hand over the foreign terrorists linked to the Al Qaeda terror network who are being sheltered in Mogadishu," Yalahow told The Associated Press. "One of our main aims is to seize one of Usama bin Laden's aides," a man Yalahow said was in Mogadishu.

U.S. officials refuse to confirm or deny financing the alliance, instead only broadly confirming contacts with many groups.

"We certainly have active efforts working with the international community and working across a spectrum of Somalis to make sure that Somalia isn't a safe haven for terrorism," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. "We have a real interest in counterterrorism efforts in Somalia."

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said recently that three Al Qaeda leaders indicted in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania are being sheltered by Islamic leaders in Mogadishu. The same Al Qaeda cell is believed responsible for the 2002 suicide bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya that killed 15 people and a simultaneous attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner.

Somalia has been without an effective central government since 1991, when clan warlords overthrew the government and divided the country into fiefdoms. The ensuing humanitarian crisis led President George H.W. Bush to order troops there in 1992.

The U.N., which left Somalia in 1995, recently helped Somali leaders meet in neighboring Kenya and form a government. Divided and weak, it has begged for political, financial and military support but its influence in Somalia covers just a few towns.

The transitional government includes members of the secular alliance. But other members of the government, which is based in Baidoa, 140 miles northwest of Mogadishu, have close ties to extremists.

Mohamed Omar Habeb, a secular commander better known as Mohamed Dhere, has accused 70 members of Somalia's new 275-seat parliament of being Islamic extremists. He said that was why the alliance was in contact with U.S. officials and was acting against Islamic militants without waiting for the new government's permission.

The Islamic leaders, including Hassan Dahir Aweys, who the U.S. government says has connections to al-Qaida, accuse the secular warlords of taking money from the CIA and creating anarchy.

Ironically, creation of the interim government has fueled the surge in violence. Somalia's clans and warlords are competing for influence as the government slowly gains international recognition.

Omar Jamal, director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center based in St. Paul, Minn., said the U.S. government needs to fully support the interim government, instead of individual warlords, or risk losing the goodwill most Somalis still have toward the United States.

"The current U.S. policy toward Somalia is creating more instability, more confusion and more backlash," he said. "It creates a sympathy and turns the Somali people into sympathizers for al-Qaida."

Although brutal, the Islamic courts, with their own militias, have been the only judicial authority in the country, he said.

They have meted out traditional justice, including public executions and amputations, much like the Taliban.

In a case last month, the 17-year-old son of a murder victim was ordered to stab the convicted perpetrator to death with a knife in front of hundreds of spectators in Mogadishu.

While similarities to Afghanistan exist, there also are important differences, Jamal said.

For example, public support for Islamic justice is fragile. The government has the chance to supplant the extremists before they become too powerful because most Somalis remain suspicious of strident forms of Islam, which clash with their traditional Sufi Muslim practices, he said.

Leaders of the secular alliance, though, are blamed for keeping the country in anarchy. Among them is Mohamed Hassan Awale, the former spokesman for the militia that shot down the Black Hawk helicopter in 1993.

Continued U.S. backing of the alliance could turn "the whole country into a terrorist base," Jamal warned.

William Rosenau, a terrorism and intelligence expert at the RAND Corp. research firm, said he too saw little chance that the U.S. could successfully influence Somali politics.

Rosenau warned that the United States is playing "a very dangerous game."

"If you get it wrong, and your fingerprints are on it, it can really have bad consequences for U.S. foreign policy," he said.

But while policy makers are concerned about "a new Afghanistan," he said the motive for contact with the warlords would probably be the chance to capture the three Al Qaeda suspects in the 1998 bombings.

"A lot of our approach to counterterrorism is very, very tactical. It's about getting specific individuals," he said. "In some ways, that is a less troubling approach than going in and trying to shape Somali politics because there seems to be a very remote chance of success there for outsiders."

[SGRock]

The "justice system" they have in place now is much like what they had before the overthrow by the warlords. When I was there in '85, a clerk at the bank in Mogadishu came up short on his drawer the equivalent of $10.00. The police took him outside, immediately put him up against the wall, and shot him. They left his body there for his relatives to retrieve.

[Vulture6]

Islamic Militia Claims Control of Somali Capital

Monday , June 05, 2006




MOGADISHU, Somalia — An Islamic militia with alleged links to Al Qaeda seized Somalia's capital Monday after weeks of fighting with U.S.-backed secular warlords, raising fears that the nation could fall under the sway of Usama bin Laden's terrorist organization.

The advance unified the city for the first time in more than a decade and after 15 years of anarchy in this Horn of Africa nation. But it also posed a direct challenge to a fledging U.N.-backed Somali government.

"We won the fight against the enemy of Islam. Mogadishu is under control of its people," Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, said in a radio broadcast. The militia, which has formed an alliance that transcends clan, controls a 65-mile radius around the capital after fighting off a secular alliance of warlords.

The Islamic militia is gaining ground just as the U.N.-backed interim government struggles to assert control outside its base in Baidoa, 155 miles from Mogadishu. The prices of weapons soared there Monday as fears grew that the militia could head to Baidoa next.

The militia is the first group to consolidate control over all of Mogadishu's neighborhoods since the last government collapsed in 1991 and warlords took over, dividing this impoverished country of 8 million people into a patchwork of rival fiefdoms.

Omar Jamal, director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, Minn., said the Islamic militia's victory in Mogadishu was a turning point in the country's history.

"It is exactly the same thing that happened with the rise to power of the Taliban" in Afghanistan, he said, adding that the extremists are "using the people's weariness of violence, rape and civil war" to gain support for a government based on Islamic law.

The battle between the militia and the secular alliance has been intensifying in recent months, with more than 300 people killed and 1,700 wounded — many of them civilians caught in the crossfire of grenades, machine guns and mortars.

Alliance leaders could not be reached for comment Monday and had likely fled Mogadishu. One of them, warlord Mohamed Dheere, was believed to be in neighboring Ethiopia seeking reinforcements.

The United States is backing the secular alliance in an attempt to root out any Al Qaeda members operating in the Horn of Africa. U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, have confirmed cooperating with the warlords. Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, president of Somalia's transitional national government, has said Washington is funding the alliance.

The Bush administration has not confirmed or denied backing the alliance, saying only that they support those who fight terror.

On Monday, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said he could not offer any details about Monday's advance by the militia.

"We do have real concerns about the presence of foreign terrorists in Somalia, and that informs an important aspect of our policy with regard to Somalia," he said.

The United States has not carried out any direct action in Somalia since the deaths of 18 servicemen in a 1993 battle depicted in the film "Black Hawk Down."

The U.S. officials said recently that Islamic leaders in Mogadishu are sheltering three Al Qaeda leaders indicted in the deadly 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. The same Al Qaeda cell is believed responsible for the 2002 suicide bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya that killed 15 people and a simultaneous attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner over Kenya.

The Islamic militants and their secular rivals began competing for influence in earnest after a U.N.-backed interim government slowly began to gain international recognition. The government, weak and wracked by infighting, has not even been able to enter the capital because of the violence.

Interim Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi recently fired four ministers who were part of the secular alliance, leaving the alliance without any support in the government.

Mogadishu residents expressed relief at Monday's relative peace, but had mixed responses to the Islamic militia's advance.

"The victory of Islamic courts is a major step toward a lasting peaceful settlement in Mogadishu," said Somali economist Abdinasir Ahmed. "We are tired of the deception and rhetoric of the warlords."

Abdulqaadir Bashir, a computer engineer, disagreed. "The Islamic clerics want to be like Taliban regime in Afghanistan," he said. "People have no hope at all."

Jamal said it will take time for the militants to consolidate their power in Mogadishu, and that the struggle to control the country will not end there. He called on the international community to do everything possible to support the U.N.-backed government to keep the Islamic radicals from expanding their power base any farther.

"This war will not stop in Mogadishu," Jamal said.

[SSGMike.Ivy]

Washington,

which has shied away from direct involvement since a humiliating 1994 exit of U.S. and U.N. troops,

has refused to discuss reports that is funneling $100,000 a month to warlords

Correct me if I am wrong here, but are not the warlords which were in power back in 1993 when 18 of our finest were brutally killed ? So this says we have been funding them for what 12 years since then? Our freaking CIA can never get anything right

[Covertness]

Not really, the warlord we were after (Adid) is no longer among the living. However, it is true that the Clinton administration was conducting back room negotiations with these scumbags even as the battle raged.
What should really jerk your chain is the fact that our support of those warlords fighting the islamic extremists has become public knowledge. (I would rather have some thug dictator in power over there than a bunch of taliban wannabees) I cannot recall a time in American history when so many secrets have been leaked to and been reported by the press.

breaking news....
The British have broken Hitler's communication codes......
The Americans have broken Tojo's communication codes....
The Germans have discovered the body of a general with invasion plans handcuffed to his wrist. What they don't realize is that this "general" is really just a nobody and the plans are a fake......
Patton given command of a dummy army designed to fool the Germans....

[Vulture6]

^ Right on the money.

[Hasbeen]

I love it when Covert shows up and puts things in such a perspective that makes it impossible to argue.