Kenyan Muslims on Saturday accused the United States of lying about plans by Somali Islamists to carry out suicide attacks in Kenya and Ethiopia, calling it part of a larger plot to attack Somalia.
The Supreme Council of Kenyan Muslims said Washington is using the alleged threats as a ploy to attack and destroy Somalia’s powerful Islamist movement, which is now girding for war with the weak government.
”America wants to cause confusion as a pretext to give it reason to once again attack and destroy the Republic of Somalia,” council chairperson Abdulghaful El Busaidy said.
”Kenyan Muslims strongly condemn … the US [for] putting Somalia and the Union of Islamic Courts as another in its axis of evil,” he told reporters at a Nairobi press conference.
Busaidy urged Kenya to continue efforts to mediate between the Islamists and the Somali government.
On Thursday, the US embassies in Nairobi and Addis Ababa warned of threats from extremists in Somalia for ”the execution of suicide explosions in prominent landmarks within Kenya and Ethiopia” and urged extreme caution.
US officials said the Islamists’ supreme leader, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, purportedly authorised attacks in internet postings as peace talks with the government collapsed this week.
Negotiations failed after the Islamists demanded that Ethiopia withdraw thousands of troops they say have been deployed to protect the government, and the removal as co-mediator of Kenya, which they say backs Ethiopia.
Aweys, a hard-line cleric designated a ”terrorist” by the US for alleged al-Qaeda ties, has not personally reacted to the allegations but other Islamist officials have rejected them as ”baseless”.
Aweys has in the past denied any connection to terrorism and denied US accusations the Islamists are harbouring al-Qaeda suspects wanted for the deadly 1998 bombings of Washington’s embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
His movement has, however, declared jihad, or holy war, on the Ethiopian troops allegedly in Somalia and has expressed anger at Kenya and Ethiopia for supporting government calls to send peacekeepers.
Earlier this year, a covert US programme to fund Somali warlords battling the Islamists for control of Mogadishu failed disastrously when the capital fell in June after months of fierce fighting.
The widely criticised scheme has caused intense animosity toward the US among the Islamists, who have since seized most of southern and central Somalia and now threaten the government seat of Baidoa.
The unrest, which many fear could explode into a regional war, has direct implications for neighbouring and mainly Christian Kenya and Ethiopia, which both have sizeable Muslim minorities.
Kenya has been flooded by tens of thousands of Somali refugees in recent months and Muslims here are concerned the US warning could spike what they complain is existing government harassment in the name of the war on terrorism.
Somalia has lacked an effective government since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, and a national administration formed in Kenya two years ago has failed to exert its authority.
The last overt US foray in Somalia ended disastrously in 1995 after its elite rangers were sucked into interclan conflict, resulting to the death of 18 US special forces members. — Sapa-AFP