The hard-line supreme leader of Somalia’s Islamic courts on Monday denied any affiliation with al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and said his group takes no orders from outsiders.
Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, whose increasingly powerful courts seized Mogadishu from United States-backed warlords after fierce clashes last month, said Bin Laden’s weekend message to Somali Islamists “has nothing to do with us”.
“The statement made by Osama has nothing to do with us,” said Aweys, who has been designated a terrorist by the US for alleged extremist links, in his first comments about Bin Laden’s message.
“Muslims share common emotions and maybe he felt like this could help Muslims who have problems today and so he made this statement,” he said in an interview with Mogadishu’s Shabelle radio station.
“He is not with us and he is far away, but maybe he wanted to express his personal feelings for other Muslims,” Aweys told the station from his home in Dhusamareb, in the Galgudud region of central Somalia.
“We have no connection with him. No one has the right to dictate what we should do.”
Aweys leads the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia, whose militia took Mogadishu from the warlords on June 5 and has vowed to expand its authority in an apparent challenge to the country’s fledgling government.
The US and others accuse the Islamists of harbouring extremists, including al Qaeda members held responsible for the 1998 bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, a charge denied by Aweys and others.
In an audiotape posted to an Islamic website on Saturday, Bin Laden came out against the deployment of foreign peacekeepers in Somalia, which has lacked a functioning government for the last 15 years, and vowed resistance to them.
The African Union on Sunday renewed its support for regional peacekeepers to be sent to Somalia, a deployment Aweys and other Islamists have pledged in the past to fight.
Also on Sunday, the prime minister of Somalia’s largely powerless transitional government, Ali Mohamed Gedi, slammed Bin Laden and his message and said the comments confirmed the presence of extremists in Somalia.
Somalia was plunged into lawlessness in 1991 after the ousting of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and the nation of about 10-million was then divided into a patchwork of fiefdoms governed by unruly warlords.
But in recent years, Islamic courts have moved to fill the power vacuum, restoring a semblance of order to areas they control with the imposition of Sharia law. — AFP