Islamist gunmen patrolled Kismayo, a key southern port, on Monday, vowing to impose strict sharia law just hours after they seized the town in a new threat to Somalia’s weak government.
Hundreds of turbaned, heavily armed fighters on ”battlewagons” — machine-gun mounted pick-ups — took up positions in and around Kismayo as the country’s powerful Islamist movement hailed the overnight takeover, witnesses said.
The Islamists rolled into Kismayo, about 500km south of Mogadishu, without firing a shot late on Sunday after the port’s nominal rulers, a local militia allied to the transitional government, fled.
The move gives the Islamists, who already control the capital and much of southern Somalia, a new and strategic position from which they say they will block the deployment of foreign peacekeepers proposed to aid the government.
”Praise be to Allah, we took Kismayo without bloodshed,” Islamist commander Sheikh Ali Mohamed Farah told Agence France-Presse in the town.
”From now on, people here will enjoy peace and prosperity,” he said. ”We are going to implement sharia law as we have in other areas.”
In Mogadishu, officials with the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS) said they wanted Kismayo to keep peacekeepers from landing there and use it as a base from which to seal the border with neighbouring Kenya.
”I can confirm that the Islamic courts have taken the town,” said SICS deputy security chief Sheikh Muktah Robow. ”We took it peacefully and there are no fears of war.
”The main objective is to close down the border with Kenya in order to stop the deployment of foreign troops,” he said.
Islamist forces had been massing around Kismayo for days, raising tensions in the town and sending several hundred residents fleeing to Kenya, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
On Monday, some residents appeared slightly wary of their new rulers but the streets were calm and many who stayed in Kismayo welcomed the Islamists.
”We were quite excited this morning to see these men wearing turbans on their heads,” said Kismayo resident Asha Moalim Birirwe. ”We now feel secure after two days of being afraid of fighting.
”We thank those who emptied the town without any bloodshed. It is a good transition for us,” he said.
Until late on Sunday, Kismayo was in the hands of the Juba Valley Alliance (JVA), a militia led by the defence minister in the government, which has accused the Islamists of breaking a truce accord by expanding their territory.
JVA officials said their retreat to an area about 40km south-west of the town had been a ”tactical withdrawal” intended to avoid needless bloodshed and vowed to recapture the port.
”We retreated tactically, but eventually we shall get back to the town and fight these invaders,” said Ali Moalim Dahir, a JVA field commander. ”We will get help from foreign countries to fight these terrorists who invaded out town”.
The fall of Kismayo, however, deals a severe blow to the government, which is based in the provincial town of Baidoa, and its hopes for the deployment of a nearly 8 000-strong regional East African peacekeeping force.
Despite fierce Islamist opposition, the seven-member Inter-Governmental Authority on Development has approved African Union-endorsed plans to send troops to salvage the government it helped create in 2004.
But its actual deployment faces numerous hurdles, not least of which are the Islamist vows to fight the force, a lack of money to pay for the mission and logistical problems, now including no port in which to land the troops.
The internationally backed but largely powerless administration is the latest in more than a dozen attempts to restore stability to Somalia, which was plunged into anarchy after the 1991 ousting of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre.
But it has been crippled by fractious infighting and unable to assert control while the Islamists have moved to fill the power vacuum. — AFP
