Free Republic

Somali Islamist fighters on Friday beheaded seven prisoners accused of abandoning the Muslim faith and spying for the government in the largest mass execution since the Islamists were pushed from power two and a half years ago. The public killings in the southwestern town of Baidoa followed weeks of fierce fighting as the Islamists try to seize Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, amid mounting concerns about the influx of hundreds of foreign fighters to the failed state. The beheadings may be linked to the Islamists' failure to take Mogadishu after a 2-month-old offensive, said a senior analyst at global intelligence company Stratfor....

Father refuses to give al Shabaab extremists information about house church pastor. Islamic extremists have beheaded two young boys in Somalia because their Christian father refused to divulge information about a church leader, and the killers are searching Kenya’s refugee camps to do the same to the boys’ father. Before taking his Somali family to a Kenyan refugee camp in April, 55-year-old Musa Mohammed Yusuf himself was the leader of an underground church in Yonday village, 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Kismayo in Somalia. He had received instruction in the Christian faith from Salat Mberwa. Militants from the Islamic extremist...

Attorneys for 10 Somali men held in an immigration detention center in South Texas allege that federal immigration officials segregated and interrogated their clients after they left a Muslim prayer service, saying they were subject to "discriminatory and unethical" questioning. Lawyers for the asylum seekers said the men — detained at the South Texas Detention Complex in Pearsall — were targeted because they were Muslim and from Somalia. The lawyers contend that their clients were segregated into a separate dormitory for two to three days after they left a Dec. 8 prayer service at the detention facility celebrating the Muslim...

Somali Muslims join radicals to fight common enemy, the US June 13, 2006 By Abdifatah Ismail The fall of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, to Islamists comes at a time when anti-terror surveillance on the Horn of Africa is at its height. At present, several western countries including the US, Germany and France have military bases in Djibouti, the northern neighbour of Somalia. From the bases these governments patrol the Red Sea and parts of the Indian Ocean in a bid to protect Western interests in the region from not only the marauding Somali pirates, but also possible al-Qaeda assaults....