Ethiopia: Terrorists rule Mogadishu

Somali Jihad Update from the Mail & Guardian, with thanks to DFS:

Members of a group listed by the United States as a terrorist band are now running the capital of neighbouring Somalia, days after Islamic fighters wrested control of the city from warlords, Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said on Tuesday.
"The renowned extremist and terrorist organisation, al-Ittihad, is at the helm of the current leadership in Mogadishu," Meles told lawmakers during a review of the situation in Ethiopian relations with neighbouring countries.

"We do not believe that all the forces that have taken control of Mogadishu and its surroundings are extremists."

Al-Ittihad is listed by the US as a terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda. Washington has accused the group of harbouring al-Qaeda leaders responsible for deadly 1998 bombings at the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

United Nations officials say al-Ittihad operates openly as a religious organisation and is a powerful economic force in southern Somalia, where it captured key towns from warlords in June.

3 Comments

arjun.sevak | July 5, 2006 9:05 AM

Mogadishu is fast going the afghanistan way. binladen had links with it as long as 15 years back.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=24595

The world can airstrike and sanitise somalia. And why don't we take over a country and colonise it if is going to hell anyway ? Why don't we take it and make it civilized ?

yadayada | July 5, 2006 1:30 PM

Indeed, it's "Taliban Afghanistan" all over again....

2 Somalis killed for watching World Cup

MOGADISHU, Somalia - Radical Islamic militia fighters in Somalia shot and killed two people who were watching a banned World Cup soccer broadcast, a radio station reported Wednesday.
The hard-line Muslim fighters, who have banned watching television, opened fire after a crowd of teenagers defied their orders to leave a hall where a businessman was showing Tuesday's Germany-Italy match on satellite television, according to Shabelle Radio, an independent local station. It said the businessman and a teenage girl were killed.

So again I say....is this the "true Islam" or is this the "nothing-to-do-with-Islam" Islam? Inquiring infidels want to know.

And if it's the latter (as many moderate Muslims will be quick to point out in a panicky effort to do damage control to Islam's PR image in the West), why oh why then that whenever there is such a political vacuum in places like Somalia and Afghanistan that the "nothing-to-do-with-Islam" Islam prevails over the "true Islam"? Is this Allah's will? Could it be that the "true Islam" is really the false one and that the Talibanic, soccer-TV-hating one is the true one?

pythagoras | July 5, 2006 7:54 PM

Don't terrorists rule ALL countries in the Islamosphere?

At least Ethiopia is being honest.

As for colonizing this and other African or Islamic countries, keep in mind the trouble that the US is now having in Iraq. That is probably what it is going to run into in Africa as well. Islam has been in Africa for over 1200 years and it has influences there we have yet to deal with...