Hello Mother… Hello Fathah… Greetings from Camp… Jihad fi sabil Allah.
Somali Jihad Update from the Hizballah News Agency, aka Reuters:
MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Somalia’s powerful Islamist movement opened a militia training camp on Wednesday with trainers from Eritrea, Afghanistan and Pakistan, witnesses said.
The presence of foreign trainers points to what many fear is a growing internationalization of a crisis that has split the Horn of Africa nation and threatened the slim authority of its interim government.
The Islamists’ hardline leader, Shiekh Hassan Dahir Aweys, attended the opening of the camp for more than 600 Islamist militiamen at Hiilweyne, north of Mogadishu.
“You will study military tactics, because you will defend your country with Islamic morality,” Aweys told the recruits.
Witnesses identified foreign trainers from Eritrea, Pakistan and Afghanistan at the camp.
Diplomats fear Somalia could become a proxy battleground for Ethiopia and Eritrea, and have said that more players like Libya, Iran and Egypt have quietly entered the fray.
Eritrea has long denied any involvement in Somalia, but a U.N. Security Council report said it has sent weapons to the Islamists repeatedly in a bid to frustrate rival Ethiopia.
Meanwhile, the Islamists said Ethiopian soldiers and a warlord ally of the government had taken a town along the Ethiopian border, stoking fears of new clashes.
In light of those developments, the leader of the Supreme Islamic Courts Council, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, has been quoted in an AP report as saying “Ethiopia is the Israel of the Horn of Africa.”
No doubt they and their allies from around the ummah would like it to be “wiped off the map,” as they do Israel.