A local militia said on Tuesday it had signed a deal with Somalia’s weak government to retake by force a key southern port it lost to powerful Islamists last week, setting the stage for fresh unrest.
”We have finalised a deal with the transitional government of Somalia to wage attacks on Kismayo,” said Colonel Abdullahi Ismail Fartag, a spokesperson for a faction of the Juba Valley Alliance (JVA) that once controlled the port.
”This is not an invasion but a plan to retake Kismayo from the Islamic courts that took the area without any concern for the local people,” he told Agence France-Presse from the government seat of Baidoa where JVA leaders have gathered.
The government would neither confirm nor deny it had an agreement with the JVA to move on Kismayo, but said the residents of the town opposed the Islamist rule there and had a right to defend themselves.
”I am not here to confirm or deny anything, but what I know is the people of Kismayo want to be free from the Islamic courts,” government spokesperson Abdurahman Dinari said in Baidoa.
”The Islamists went there by force with the help of foreign fighters,” he told said. ”The people of Kismayo have the right to defend themselves. Kismayo was attacked while it was peaceful.”
Fartag’s faction of the JVA, led by the government’s defence minister, Barre Shire Hirale, abandoned Kismayo on September 24, allowing gunmen loyal to the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia surrounding the town to take it.
At the time, the government condemned the move and Hirale’s fighters pledged to re-capture Kismayo that the Islamists said they took to prevent a proposed foreign peacekeeping force from landing at the port.
Fartag said plans for re-taking the town, in the Lower Juba region about 500km south of Mogadishu, were in the advanced stages and JVA forces were assembling for the assault in the neighbouring Gedo region.
”I can’t tell you when the attack will place precisely for military reasons but I would like to confirm that we will retake Kismayo,” Fartag said. ”We are not saying if, but when.”
The Islamists rolled into Kismayo without firing a shot and were patrolling the streets on September 25, enforcing a strict brand of sharia law they have imposed on much of the rest of the southern and central Somalia they control.
They have since put down at least three anti-Islamist demonstrations there, killing at least two protesters, according to residents, arresting numerous others and temporarily closing a local radio station. — Sapa-AFP