Somalia is E. African "epicentre of jihadism"

Reuters ^ | 11/19/06

[Valin]

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Somalia has replaced Sudan as the "epicentre of jihadism" in east Africa since the rise of a powerful Islamist movement, according to a U.S. author who has just finished a new book on the Horn of Africa nation. "The most potent expression of jihadism in the region has occurred in stateless Somalia," says Gregory Alonso Pirio. His book, "The African Jihad: Bin Laden's Quest for the Horn of Africa", is due to be published early next year. "With the military triumph of the Islamic Courts, southern Somalia came to replace Sudan as the epicentre of jihadism in the region with the spectre of renewed regional instability," he added in a hawkish analysis of the religious movement's roots.

Borne out of sharia courts, Somalia's Islamist movement kicked out U.S.-backed warlords from Mogadishu in June. It went on to take a swathe of southern Somalia in defiance of the authority of a Western-backed interim government trying to restore central rule for the first time since 1991. Critics say the Islamists are a Taliban-like movement, with links to foreign terrorists. The Islamists say they are bringing order and have been smeared by U.S. and other propaganda.

Pirio, a former director at the U.S. government-funded Voice of America radio and now president of media firm Empowering Communications, said the Council of Somali Islamic Courts were descendants of a previous radical group al-Itihaad al-Islaami. The current top Islamist leader in Somalia, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, was head of that group's military wing in the 1990s, when it was largely decimated by Ethiopian attacks. "The rise of the Al Itihaad-led Islamic Courts presents to counter-terrorism strategists what is likely their nightmare scenario for Somalia," Pirio added. "The people in charge of the (Islamist) military are out of the al Itihaad movement...all al Qaeda-connected...They control the guns."

BLACK HAWK DOWN

Al Qaeda operatives trained al Itihaad operatives in the early 1990s, while Iran also supplied arms, he said. The U.S. intervention in Somalia in 1992, ahead of a U.N. peacekeeping force, merely fuelled Muslim radicals, Pirio added. Washington pulled out soon after Somali militias shot down two military helicopters and killed 18 rangers in late 1993 on a day later dramatised in the movie "Black Hawk Down".

Pirio's mention of Iran echoed a report by U.N. experts in recent days charging that Iran backs the new Islamist movement. "It doesn't surprise me," he told Reuters in a weekend interview. "You can see that with the U.S.-Iraq situation, then Somalia has a strategic importance for Iran."

Critics say Washington promoted the emergence of the Islamic courts by funding their enemies -- warlords in Mogadishu who formed a "counter-terror" alliance -- and thus fuelling popular support and militancy. But Pirio said that view was flawed. "I argue in the book that the Islamic courts are actively aggressive in Somalia prior to the U.S. support for this anti-terrorism group," he said. "Rather than seeing the U.S. support as triggering this aggressive position, the Islamic courts under Aweys back in 1999, 2000, 2001, were already expansionist."

The Islamists' relatively unchecked expansion around southern Somalia could now be held back both by the opposition of regional power Ethiopia, and the movement's concentration of leaders from the local Hawiye clan, he argued. "As they are moving into other areas, they are being branded a clan phenomenon rather than an Islamic phenomenon."

Their wider goal, however, was ambitious, he said. "They have a kind of romantic vision of what Somalia was in the past, and (their aim) is to unite all Somalis under a caliphate or an emirate," he said, referring to ethnic Somali regions of neighbouring countries like Ethiopia and Kenya.

Pirio said an anti-poverty "Marshall Plan"-like strategy for the Horn of Africa was the best strategy against extremism. A representative democracy like Kenya is a good example of a positive antithesis to Somalia, he said. "People actually listen to Muslim concerns in Kenya."

[PGalt]

BUMP

[DCBryan1]

Nuke it.

[Niuhuru]

I agree. It's the only way to end the troubles there.

[Niuhuru]

I agree. It's the only way to end the troubles there.