Mogadishu Falls to Fascislamic Militia

While the world media had their eyes on events in Baghdad, Washington and Tehran, a major development quietly passed by them. Militia forces of a Fascislamic nature captured the capital of Somalia after a three-month battle. “We won the fight against the enemy of Islam. Mogadishu is under control of its people,” Sharif Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, said in a radio broadcast. Rarely is that sort of thing good for the people.

Somalia is a member of the UN with about 8 million people divided into various clans. There hasn’t been a real central government since 1991, when clan-based militia kicked out President Mohamed Siad Barre. Then, they promptly turned on each other, and that has been that. The US sent food aid in 1992, which ended in tears as the film “Black Hawk Down” dramatized.

Now, the Islamic Courts Union has put together a militia that transcends clan loyalties, and it controls a 100-kilometre radius around Mogadishu. They aren’t done. “Until we get the Islamic state, we will continue with the Islamic struggle in Somalia,” Sheikh Sharif told a rally of hundreds of people. “This is a long Islamic struggle and it will continue until the whole country comes under sharia law,” Fuad Ahmed, a militiaman loyal to the Islamic side, told Reuters. “We are ready to shed our blood in order for that struggle to succeed.” Oh, goodie, a blood sacrifice -- usually someone else's.

The US, according to press reports that cite anonymous US officials, has been helping the warlords who just lost Mogadishu in an attempt to keep the friends of Al Qaeda from taking over a country that commands the southern end of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Officially, the Bush administration isn’t telling – so one may conclude it’s too embarrassed at the behavior or ineptitude of its surrogates.

That same Reuters story quoted Omar Jamal, director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, “It is exactly the same thing that happened with the rise to power of the Taliban” in Afghanistan. The Islamic Courts Union is “using the people’s weariness of violence, rape and civil war” to create support for a Sharia-law government.

The Washington Post wrote, “Bush administration officials say they believe that several al-Qaeda associates, including Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who has been tagged as an organizer of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi and a 2002 suicide bombing at an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, have found refuge in Somalia, Washington Post staff writer Karen DeYoung reported from Washington.”

So, while a misguided attempt to create a unified, peaceful, democratic and free Iraq continues to stumble to an unhappy conclusion, the question arises, “Who lost Somalia?” while no one was looking.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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