The Islamic Courts Union are back — in some areas of Mogadishu. “Islamists target Somalis in terror campaign: Islamists target white aid workers,” by Alex Strick van Linschoten in the Sunday Times, May 11 (thanks to Morgaan Sinclair):
When Ibrahim Saeed Abdullah saw a neighbour’s cinema burnt down by a barrage of grenades, he realised that he had no choice but to heed the death threats he had received from the big men with guns in their hands and hatred in their hearts. Last week he closed the doors of his own cinema for the last time.
It was two years since Abdullah had opened for business in Mogadishu, the largely ruined capital of war-torn Somalia. The location may have been inauspicious but the timing seemed right: the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamist coalition that briefly took over much of the country in 2006, had just been driven out by an American-backed Ethiopian invasion.
In recent months, however, Al-Shabab, the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union, has spread renewed fear through Mogadishu, a city of up to 3m people that has been convulsed by fighting for 17 years.
Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Al-Shabab does not approve of the showing of films.
Soon Abdullah’s cinema was the last one standing in Mogadishu and he was threatened repeatedly. “They came with weapons, surrounded my cinema and told me, “˜We will kill you if you don’t close”,” he said.
Al-Shabab, now an autonomous rebel group which has added an explosive element to the combustible mix of Mogadishu’s militias, enforces strict sharia (Islamic law) and uses tactics imported from the global jihadi movement. As in Afghanistan, those who work or trade with the government risk being branded as spies or collaborators and beheaded as a warning to others.
Members of Al-Shabab deliver “night letters” to businessmen and others they wish to intimidate. One such letter listed “traitors assisting the occupiers who attacked the country” and warned of action if they did not make amends in 48 hours.
The group has overrun at least eight towns this year and taken control of large swathes of Mogadishu. It is behind a spate of roadside bombings directed at convoys of Ethiopian troops….