United Nations officials travelled to Mogadishu on Monday for their first talks with Somali Islamists, who wrested control of the Somali capital last month.
The UN team flew into Mogadishu from Kenya under heavy security and inspected several areas of city, which has been under Islamist control since June 5 when they routed the warlords after four months of bloody clashes.
”We are discussing with them plans for the pacification of Mogadishu,” one senior Islamist told Agence France-Presse on condition of anonymity.
The UN team, headed by Joe Gordon, the UN’s chief security adviser for Somalia, held talks with top officials of the newly formed Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia, including Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, officials said.
It also visited the city’s seaport and the international airport, which was closed after UN and United States peacekeepers fled the anarchic Horn of Africa nation at the height of inter-clan fighting in the mid 1990s.
The UN operates field offices across Somalia, but it does not have a permanent office or foreign staff in the lawless capital.
The visit came as Islamic militia deployed battlewagons — pick-ups mounted with machineguns — and fighters to compel Abdi Awale Qeydiid, the last hold-out warlord, to surrender his weapons.
Qeydiid, who controlled the town of Afgoi, about 30km south-west of the capital, has defied calls from his clan to surrender weapons and join the Islamists or flee the city.
He was among the members of the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism that was battling the Islamist, who are accused of having links with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network and harbouring extremists.
The Islamists have denied the charges and Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the hard-line cleric who is now their supreme leader, said on Monday his group had no affiliation with Bin Laden.
The al-Qaeda leader issued a statement at the weekend supporting the Islamists and warning against the deployment of foreign peacekeepers in Somalia.
”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.
”We have no connection with him. No one has the right to dictate what we should do,” he said in an interview with Mogadishu’s Shabelle radio station.
In an audiotape posted to an Islamic website on Saturday, Bin Laden vowed to resist foreign peacekeepers in Somalia, which has lacked an functioning government for the last 15 years. — AFP
