- Title: [SW News] (AFP) Islamic group in Somalia among US most wanted
- Posted by/on:[AAJ][25 Sept 2001]
Tuesday, September 25 3:22 AM SGT
Islamic group in Somalia among US most wanted
NAIROBI, Sept 24 (AFP) -
Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (AIAI), one of the groups on the US most wanted list, is an
armed, quasi-clandestine fundamentalist organisation formed in the early 1990s to set up a
hardline Islamic state in Somalia.
Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (Unity of Islam), took up arms in an earlier phase of its
struggle, and has been labelled by some of its detractors as a terrorist organisation, a
charge that has yet to be publically proven.
Seasoned Somalia watchers who spoke to AFP on Monday said they were unaware of any
direct connection between AIAI and Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda, the international network
he allegedly leads and which is held responsible for the September 11 attacks on New York
and Washington.
No reliable information as to the size of AIAI's membership was available Monday. The
only available name associated with the group is Hassan Dayer Aweis, formerly one of its
top commanders, now thought to be a businessman in the Gulf.
The group tends to attract the more ascetic of Muslims in Somalia, where Islam is
prevalent.
The US has not established bilateral relations with Somalia's interim government, but
neither has Washington obstructed the fledgling regime's participation in many
international fora.
One Nairobi based analyst described AIAI as a "political Islamic movement looking
to take control of the Somali state and run it according to its fundamentalist reading of
Sharia law."
AIAI helped establish Somalia's Islamic courts and then ceded control of these courts
to the Transitional National Government (TNG) that was set up in Somalia last year, a
decade after the fall of the previous regime, which was led by Mohammed Siad Barre.
According to some sources, militias who onced acted as the courts' police, many of whom
were originally drawn from the AIAI, are now being integrated into the TNG's own military
machine.
The TNG, however, has tried hard to shake off the fundamentalist tag painted by those
opposed to the regime.
These include most of the warlords who have held sway in Somalia since Barre's fall,
notably Hussein Mohammed Aidid.
Like most warlords with aspirations for power, Aidid has long been opposed to hardline
groups such as AIAI which might eat into his own support base.
"It is a fundamentalist organisation that should be treated as terrorists,"
he told AFP Monday, suggesting AIAI intended to destabilise the whole of east Africa.
In the mid 1990s, AIAI worked with a group of the same name based in the Somali region
of Ethiopia, prompting Addis Ababa to send tanks and artillery across the border to defeat
AIAI's forces in 1996.
The same year, the group fought the Somalia Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) in the
northeast and lost. The SSDF went on become the self-declared authority in the autonomous
region of Puntland.
AIAI is known to have had coastal training camps at Ras Kamboni, south of Kismayo,
close to the Kenyan border, and at Las Quoay, near the northeastern port of Bosasso.
It is not clear whether these camps are still operational.
After its military failures, AIAI took on the guise of a humanitarian organisation,
winning support by eshewing arms and involving itself in urban social services and relief
work.
One analyst suggests that since the attacks on the US, AIAI has somewhat emerged from
the shadows to take advantage of the political impetus in the air, fanning the flames of
Islamic solidarity against the perceived persecution of the Christian United States.
[ News] |