U.S. Hopes Moderate Figure in Movement Can Help Curb Mogadishu Violence
By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
NAIROBI, Jan. 22 -- A top moderate leader of Somalia's ousted Islamic Courts movement surrendered to Kenyan authorities Monday, and U.S. officials are hoping he can help subdue a rising insurgency among the movement's supporters on the streets of the Somali capital, Mogadishu.
After dodging U.S. and Ethiopian airstrikes in the mangrove forests of southern Somalia, Sharif Ahmed is under the protection of Kenyan authorities in a comfortable Nairobi hotel that he is not allowed to leave. U.S. officials have never accused him of any crime and are portraying him as a moderate Islamic leader with whom the Somali government should negotiate.
European Union officials have made reconciliation with Islamic leaders in Somalia a condition of financing a proposal to send African Union peacekeepers to the country.
The U.S. and European diplomatic pressure to negotiate comes as Somali and Ethiopian troops in Mogadishu are conducting house-to-house hunts almost daily for people accused of supporting the Islamic movement, which Ethiopian troops overthrew last month.
The ongoing purge in the broken-down capital is creating an atmosphere veering toward paranoia. Many Somalis, including members of the new government's parliament, have gone into hiding for fear of being arrested, and others are afraid even to talk about the ousted Islamic movement, according to people in several Mogadishu neighborhoods who were interviewed by telephone.
Abdirahman Dinari, a spokesman for the Somali government, declined to comment on the prospect of negotiations with Ahmed or other Islamic leaders. He said the arrests in recent weeks have targeted people suspected of involvement in attacks on Somali and Ethiopian troops, including the shelling of the presidential residence in Mogadishu on Friday. On Saturday, the deputy chairman of the Islamic Courts, Ahmed Qare, asserted responsibility for that attack.
"If there is someone who is innocent, we will release them," Dinari said.
Families, neighbors and some local leaders, however, describe the arrests as part witch hunt and part orchestrated campaign of revenge.
"Anyone known to have spoken out in favor of the Courts is in hiding," said Mohamud Uluso, a prominent member of the sub-sub clan called the Ayr, which had provided substantial military and financial support to the Islamic Courts. "They did not commit any crime, but publicly they supported the Courts. They did not kill anyone. They did nothing."
According to witnesses, the arrests have at times been more like kidnappings, with plainclothes security forces blindfolding people, throwing them into trucks and hauling them off to secret locations. There have been reports of Somalis settling petty arguments with neighbors by accusing them of supporting the Islamic Courts, with Ethiopian troops then swooping in to take the accused away.
While some of those arrested have been released after several days -- or after relatives pay -- others remain missing.
Ethiopian and Somali government troops came after dark last week to Ahmed Luqman's crowded, lantern-lit neighborhood, where he has lived with his wife and six children for more than 20 years.
Soldiers surrounded the area known as Bulo Huvey, broke down a metal gate, shoved their way into a neighbor's house and arrested at least two people whom Luqman has known for years, he said.
Certain he was next, although not sure why, he climbed through a window and ran.
"I escaped," recounted Luqman, who said he was never a staunch supporter of the Islamic movement. "Now I live somewhere far from where I used to live, because I'm afraid. I'm afraid for myself. I know a lot have been arrested. Some have been killed. But I can't tell exactly the number."
The U.S. State Department tacitly supported the Ethiopian invasion that pushed the Courts movement from power, and in December it cast the Islamic Courts as a group controlled by an al-Qaeda cell. Many regional analysts and diplomats have described that claim as exaggerated.
This month, U.S. and Ethiopian aircraft conducted strikes targeting not only three men suspected in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies -- and whom the Courts were accused of sheltering -- but also certain Courts leaders accused of having al-Qaeda connections.
"To defeat them, the U.S. put them all in one basket," said Uluso, who met with State Department officials when the Islamic Courts came to power last June. "Then, after they were defeated, the thinking was they could maybe reconsider and take the good guys and empower them, so that the image that America is against Islam will not be on the table. Because that has been the impression in the Islamic world."
But the U.S. airstrike in southern Somalia -- aid groups have reported that it killed at least 20 civilians -- plus the continuing arrests are working against the goal of inclusion, said a top leader of the Islamic movement who is still in the region.
The leader, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, warned that if the detentions continue, "things could get ugly."
He said that the leadership of the Islamic Courts is "completely intact" and that U.S. ambassadors have been in contact with some of its members.
Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi has often used the label "terrorist" to justify the detentions. But the pattern of arrests suggests to many analysts in the region that the situation is less about fighting a global war on terrorism than it is about Ethiopia trying to address its internal security problems and help Somali government leaders settle their own old scores.
For one, the arrests are heavily targeting Ayr neighborhoods that had supported the Courts. The Ayr are considered rivals of Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf's clan, the Darod. Moreover, Yusuf, a close ally of Ethiopia, has had a long-standing personal feud with Islamic Courts leader Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, who is Ayr and is on a U.S. list of people suspected of ties to al-Qaeda. Aweys has consistently denied such ties.
There has also been an ethnic dimension to the arrests. Ethiopian and Somali security forces are focusing on people such as Luqman who are from a region of Ethiopia along the Somali border where an underground group has been fighting for years to end Ethiopian control. The group, the Oromo Liberation Front, was suspected of having people in Mogadishu and of cooperating with the Islamic Courts.
But the Oromo region has also been the scene of droughts and other tribulations that have forced thousands of refugees across the border and into Somali cities, including Mogadishu.
"Whether a man has relations with those organizations or not, he will be arrested," Luqman said. "Because he is Oromo. They can't distinguish if he belongs to the movement or not. So that's the problem."
At one Oromo refugee camp, a sprawl of doorless houses with cardboard roofs, the people left were mostly old men, women and children. A leader there, Abdirahman Omar, 67, said that Ethiopian and Somali troops showed up after morning prayers Jan. 4 and arrested 12 Oromo refugees, including his son, Aden. All remain missing.
"He does not even speak the Oromo language," said Omar, who came to Somalia in 1979 and said his son is a math teacher. "He knows nothing about Ethiopia, let alone Ethiopian politics."
In another neighborhood, Kilometre Four, Habiba Dahir said that her husband, Abdijabar Isee, an Oromo, was arrested recently as he was walking down the street with a Somali friend.
The friend told her later that a plainclothes Somali policeman approached them and asked Abdijabar for his name, and that shortly afterward a pickup truck full of green-uniformed Somali police officers drove up, blindfolded her husband and threw him in the truck with another blindfolded man.
"At first we were told he was killed, but later we learned he is alive," said Dahir, who denied her husband was involved with any militant movement. "I can't say any more."
Special correspondent Mohamed Ibrahim in Mogadishu contributed to this report .
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