The Somali transitional federal government has called for the powerful Islamist militia to be excluded from peace talks this week after sparking clashes in the capital that killed at least 21 people on the weekend, officials said on Monday.
Deputy Prime Minister Hussein Aidid, a warlord whose fighters were evicted from southern Mogadishu on Sunday, said the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS) militants had violated a mutual recognition and truce deal signed with government on June 21.
Another round of talks is expected to take place in Khartoum on Saturday.
Stung by loss of territorial control, Aidid demanded the Islamists abandon territories they seized in the Darkenlay, Medina and Hodan districts of Mogadishu and ”return back to their former position [that] they were stationed [at] during and before June 21.”
The SICS system, he charged, is ”based on the type of the extremism of the previously destroyed Taliban government in Afghanistan, having soon attracted and got support of Osama bin Laden and his extremist organisation”.
After chairing a Cabinet meeting in the south-central town of Baidoa on Sunday, Aidid said action should be taken against the Islamists fighting ”in the country not to attend or take part in the next scheduled … talks to be held in Khartoum on July 15”.
The government said, however, it was ready to meet other branches of the Islamic courts, such as civil groups and businessmen who were not involved the violence, which erupted when Islamic militants attacked an enclave controlled by warlords Aidid and Abdi Hassan Awale Qeydiid.
The pair had refused to surrender and hand over their weapons to the Islamists, who routed the other warlords from the capital on June 5.
In addition, the government said the creation of SICS last month, which named Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys — a hard-line cleric and a designated terrorist by the United States — as its supreme leader, was ”intended to undermine the laws and system of the Somali government”.
The Somali Cabinet also protested what it said had been ”private contacts” between an Italian special envoy to Somalia, Senator Mario Raffaeli, and Aweys, the statement said, without giving details of the alleged contact.
The latest unrest brings the toll to at least 381 dead and more than 2 000 wounded in fighting that first erupted on February 18 when the US-backed Alliance for Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, a group of warlords, sought to curb the growing influence of the Islamists.
The Islamists are accused of links with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network and of harbouring foreign fighters, but they have vehemently rejected the charges. — Sapa-AFP