Note: Here’s another look at the same situation.
QUOTE:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/025818.php
April 24, 2009
Jihad leader returns to Somalia
Reconciler
In 2007 I wrote this in the Journal of International Security Affairs: “Aweys, who became the [Islamic Courts Union] group’s leader around the same time it began to gain significant power in Somalia, struck an explicitly anti-American posture and spoke of the Islamic Courts’ effort to take control of Somalia as part of the global jihad, vowing to fight America and its allies ‘everywhere, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan.’”
And now he is back.
“Sheikh Aweys returns to Somalia to ‘reconcile Islamist factions,’” from Garowe Online, April 23 (thanks to James):
MOGADISHU, Somalia Apr 23 (Garowe Online) - The leading opposition figure in Somalia returned to the country on Thursday after spending more than two years exiled in Eritrea, Radio Garowe reports.
Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the former legislative head of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), arrived on a private plane at No.50 airstrip in Lower Shabelle region.
He was accompanied by a seven-member delegation from the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS), an Islamist-led opposition group that divided into two camps months before ex-ICU executive chief Sheikh Sharif Ahmed became President of Somalia.
“I will meet with anyone concerned about Somalia and my trip [to Somalia] is not influenced by foreign countries,” Sheikh Aweys told Qatar-based Al Jazeera TV, although he did not specify whether he plans to meet with President Sheikh Sharif.
Sheikh Ismail Haji Addow, a senior member of ARS-Eritrea, told reporters that Sheikh Aweys would meet with meet with different sections of society in Mogadishu to promote reconciliation among Islamist factions.
“We [ARS-Eritrea] have moved back to Mogadishu, but we will keep an office in Eritrea,” Sheikh Addow said, while underscoring that Sheikh Aweys’ main task would be to reconcile factions within the muqawama, or the resistance movement that became popular during the Ethiopian army’s two-year intervention in south-central Somalia....
Sheikh Aweys fled Mogadishu in Jan. 2007 as Ethiopian troops backing then-Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf’s interim government entered the capital and dislodged the ICU from power.
The ICU fractured into different factions and began a bloody guerrilla war, known locally as the muqawama.
Some ICU factions later joined the Somali government, but the hardliners like Al Shabaab and Hizbul Islam – to which Sheikh Aweys and the ARS-Eritrea faction is a member – have rejected to recognize the government....
Posted by Robert at April 24, 2009 2:28 AM
Note: The following post is a quote:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2238311/posts
6 Killed in Somalia in Attack on African Union Peacekeepers
Garowe Online ^ | 26 Apr 26, 2009
Posted on April 26, 2009 3:06:25 PM PDT by nickcarraway
At least six people were killed Saturday afternoon in the Somali capital Mogadishu after Islamist hardliners attacked African Union peacekeepers (AMISOM), Radio Garowe reports.
The fighting began after armed groups launched mortars at an AMISOM base home to Burundian soldiers, witnesses said.
Several mortars hit residential areas in Hodan and Howlwadaag districts, killing at least six civilians and wounding nearly 25 people.
“Two people were killed in Howlwadaag [district] including my brother,” witness Ahmed Salad told Mogadishu-based radio stations.
Another witness said he saw three dead civilians at Bakara Market, the country’s largest marketplace, saying that shells hit inside the market causing civilian deaths.
Workers at Daynile Hospital and Medina Hospital in Mogadishu said tens of wounded civilians were admitted for emergency treatment.
An officer who spoke for AMISOM said no peacekeepers were hurt during the attack, but noted that three civilians who came to the AMISOM medical center for medicines were hurt.
No group has claimed responsibility for attacking AMISOM peacekeepers, but the deadly attacks come at a time Islamist opposition leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys has returned to Mogadishu and has demanded the withdrawal of AMISOM from Somali soil.