Somali Islamists Cement Control of South Amid Border Tension
MOGADISHU, Somalia, June 17 The leader of the Islamists who now control most of southern Somalia accused the United States on Saturday of orchestrating what he called a border incursion by hundreds of Ethiopian troops.
“We want the whole world to know what’s going on,” Sheik Sharif Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, told reporters in the provincial town of Jowhar. “The United States is encouraging Ethiopia to take over the area.”
American officials said they were not involved in an incursion, and Ethiopian authorities denied the claims that several hundred of their soldiers had entered Somalia in the southwestern Gedo region on Saturday morning. What had occurred, Ethiopian officials told reporters in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, was that their troops had massed on their side of the border to prevent an incursion from the Islamists in Somalia.
“Ethiopia has a right to monitor its border,” said Bereket Simon, an adviser to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
The reports touch on a very real concern in Somalia. Ethiopia has sent troops into Somalia in the past to root out suspected militants, and the Ethiopian government has distanced itself from the new Islamist administration in Mogadishu. It favors instead the fledging transitional government led by President Abdullahi Yusuf that is based well outside Mogadishu in the provincial town of Baidoa.
It is clear, however, that the Islamists in Mogadishu now hold the bulk of the power in the country.
The militias associated with them have sealed their grip on most of the south. They first defeated Mogadishu’s longtime warlords on June 6 after months of fighting that left more than 300 people dead and thousands injured.
The Islamists set up Shariah courts, based on Islamic law, across Somalia in recent years, trying to pull the country from its long decline into anarchy. The United States has accused them of harboring a small number of people suspected of being Al Qaeda members. The courts union leaders deny links to extremists.
On Friday, the courts union arranged a large demonstration in Mogadishu against plans to allow foreign peacekeepers into Somalia to quell the long spell of violence. “We will be able to bring peace without bringing in foreign troops,” said Sheik Abdulkadir Ali Omar, the deputy chairman of the courts union.
Two of the main warlords who had battled the Islamists in recent months fled Mogadishu late Friday by boat, according to news agency reports, meaning the end of the 11-member, American-backed Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, the secular warlords’ coalition. Islamic leaders said that an American warship had picked them up off Somalia’s coast, a claim that Navy officials disputed.
nytimes.com
UN fears new conflict in Somalia
Daily arms shipments are arriving in Somalia in violation of a United Nations arms embargo, a senior UN official has told the BBC.
Bruno Schiemsky, co-ordinator of the UN Monitoring Group, said the flow of arms had risen substantially since Islamists went on the offensive this month.
He warned it was only a matter of time before the Union of Islamic Courts clashed with interim government forces.
The African Union has urged the world to renew support for the government.