Islamic “Holy War” In Somalia
Mustafa Haji Abdinur with AFP reports: “Fierce fighting has erupted between Somalia’s weak Ethiopian-backed government and powerful Islamists south of the government’s seat of Baidoa, the two sides have said.”
They say “Islam will dominate the world.” It appears the Third World is the easiest place to start.
“The Islamists attacked our forces at bases near Dinsoor and we fought but they have suffered very much today,” Deputy Defense Minister Salat Ali Jelle told reporters in Baidoa, the only major town the government holds.
. . .Meanwhile in Mogadishu, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) southeast of Baidoa, the spokesman for the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS), Abdurahim Ali Muddey said the government had been routed.
“Our holy warriors defeated them and they suffered much from Allah’s wrath,” he told AFP, adding that a number of Islamist fighters had been killed but declining to give a figure. “We had a small number of mujahadeens killed.”
SICS executive chief Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed told a large crowd after Friday prayers that the battle began when a joint Somali government-Ethiopian force attacked Islamist fighters near Dinsoor.
“Our forces have been raided by Ethiopian troops, so people get up and fight against the Ethiopians,” Ahmed said, urging Somalis to join a holy war against Ethiopian troops and oppose a proposed UN-authorized peacekeeping mission.
“Stand up and defeat the enemies who have invaded our land,” he told several hundred people protesting the UN Security Council’s adoption on Wednesday of a resolution authorizing regional peacekeepers for Somalia.
In recent days, the Islamists, some of whom are accused of Al-Qaeda links, and the government have been girding for battle near Dinsoor which the government claimed to have retaken from the Islamists on Tuesday.
Many fear a full-scale war in Somalia could spread throughout the Horn of Africa, drawing in Ethiopia and its arch-foe Eritrea, which denies backing the Islamists.
Somalia has lacked an effective government since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Siad Barre and the two-year-old government has failed to exert control across the nation of about 10 million people.