US cites African support for policy on Somalia

July 11, 2006 (WASHINGTON) — The United States said on Tuesday that its opposition to the emergence of a militant Islamist state in Somalia has won support from the country’s neighbors in east Africa.

Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said it was not clear if the powerful Islamist courts movement that has captured a large swath of southern Somalia can overcome clan barriers to form a broader political front.

Somalia, which has had no effective central government for 15 years, has seen some of its worst fighting in recent months as Islamists defeated a U.S.-backed coalition of secular warlords in the capital Mogadishu.

Frazier spoke as Mogadishu’s last secular warlord surrendered to the Islamists after two days of heavy fighting in which more than 60 people died.

She told a Senate subcommittee that the international community, from the African Union to the Arab League and United Nations, view Somalia’s fragile transitional federal government as the country’s only legitimate governing body.

Frazer, who recently returned from a trip to the region, urged the Islamists to engage the government in dialogue.

“Leaders in the region are urging stronger U.S. engagement,” she said.

“We speak with one voice, I believe except for Eritrea, in opposing an extremist Islamist takeover of the government in Somalia,” she said.

U.S. officials say al Qaeda, which used Somalia as a base to bomb the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya in 1998, still has a presence in the country and could expand operations under the protection of government run by Islamist extremists.

(Reuters)