Foreigners join Somalian islamist militias – rivals

May 17, 2006 (MOGADISH) — Foreign fighters battled alongside Islamist militias for control of the Somali capital during a surge of recent violence that killed more than 140 people, the militias’ secular rivals said Wednesday.

The latest violence between Islamic militias and secular fighters has been some of the worst fighting in more than a decade in Somalia, which has had no effective central government since 1991. A cease-fire was signed over the weekend but the mood remained tense.

“Some foreigners were fighting alongside the local terrorists and were killed, but nobody was caught alive and delivered to anybody,” said Hussein Gutale Ragheh, a spokesman for the secular alliance. He said some of those killed were Arabs and others looked like Pakistanis, Sudanese and Oromo fighters from neighboring Ethiopia.

The Islamic militants have portrayed themselves as capable of bringing order to Somalia, whose descent into chaos began with the 1991 overthrow of longtime dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. Since then, warlords who divided the country into clan-based fiefdoms have fought one another, though some recently joined a U.N.-backed interim government trying to assert control.

The secular alliance, which includes some members of the interim government but acts independently of it, accuses the Islamic militiamen of having ties to al-Qaida. The Islamists accuse the secularists of being puppets of the U.S.

The U.S. State Department has repeatedly expressed concern that Somalia could become a haven for militants. The U.N. and the International Crisis Group, a private think tank which tracks worldwide conflicts, have said al-Qaida has used Somalia as a hide-out and a transit zone.

Transitional President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed told The Associated Press in an interview earlier this month that he believes Washington is supporting the secular militia as a way of fighting several senior al-Qaida operatives that are being protected by radical clerics. Ahmed called on Washington to instead work only with his government.

The U.S. has said only that it had met with a wide variety of Somali leaders in an effort to fight “international terrorists” here.

(ST/AP)