Somalia’s radical Islamic leaders held a rally on Wednesday that drew thousands of mostly women and students in the port city of Kismayo, and vowed to wage holy war against any group that tries to stop their military advances.
”The time [the] ambiguity and hypocrisy has ended. By God, we will wage a holy war against our enemies,” senior Islamic official Mohammed Wali Sheik Ahmed told a crowd of at least 5 000. The militia seized Kismayo, one of the last remaining ports outside their control and Somalia’s third-largest city, last week without a fight.
But thousands turned out to protest against the group after they arrived, and a 13-year-old was killed when the radicals, organised under a coalition of Islamic courts, opened fire. Several smaller protests were held despite the violence that met the initial demonstration.
On Wednesday, Islamic gunmen kept watch over the crowd from a dozen cars fitted with guns.
The demonstrators were mostly women and students who attend Islamic schools in Kismayo. The women held up copies of the Qur’an and students wore yellow and green school uniforms. The crowd decried interference by neighbouring Ethiopia, which backs Somalia’s weak official government.
”We came here to support Islamic courts and reject Ethiopia,” said Suleiman Omar, a 30-year-old English teacher. ”Ethiopia is against the peace and stability that came with Islamic courts, who are working according to our interests and wishes.”
Somalia has not had an effective national government since 1991, when warlords overthrew dictator Mohammed Siad Barre and then turned on one another, throwing the country into anarchy.
A transitional government was formed in 2004 with United Nations help in hopes of restoring order after years of lawlessness. But it has struggled to assert authority, while the Islamic movement seized the capital, Mogadishu, in June and now controls much of the south.
The Islamic group’s strict and often severe interpretation of Islam raises memories of Afghanistan’s Taliban, which was ousted by a United Sates-led campaign for harbouring Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda fighters.
The United States has accused Somalia’s Islamic group of sheltering suspects from the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden has said Somalia is a battleground in his war on the West. — Sapa-AP