Pakistan News And Discussion-9

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Our jihadi militias in Somalia? </b>
FT
Khaled Ahmed
Soon many warriors from all over the Islamic world are expected to get to Somalia. Because Ethiopia is Christian-ruled and is being helped by America 
 
There is trouble in Somalia again and some newspapers in the United States have named Pakistanis among the Yemenis and the Chechens who are fighting there on behalf of Al Qaeda.

In June 2006, the Islamists took control from a government in Somalia that was hardly functional because of its tribal warlordism. This is a phenomenon we are familiar with from Afghanistan. The clerics who became empowered then set up sharia courts. Unsurprisingly, the Somali clerics too became inclined to an extreme Salafism meant to reform the Somali society the same way the Taliban had theirs.

The world got scared after learning the incongruous punishments the clerical courts were dishing out to the people. One clerical judge actually gave death to soccer-watchers on TV.

Like the Taliban, the militia serving the clergy provided security to the people tired of the depredations of tribal hoods since Somalia’s last dictator Siad Barre gave up in 1991. Like the Taliban, the clerics, calling themselves United Islamic Courts (UIC), were not given recognition by the UN.

In 1992, civil war among the various tribes in Somalia coincided with famine in Ethiopia. One General Farah Eidid got hold of the capital Mogadishu as one part of the country called Somaliland broke away.

The UN sent its forces into Somalia to quell the carnage so that the starving people could be fed. They ran into Eidid in 1993. Osama bin Laden was next-door in Sudan and came down on the side of Eidid with money, weapons and men.

Eidid ended up killing 18 Americans under the UN mandate in an encounter made famous by the film titled Black Hawk Down . Then he ambushed and killed 24 Pakistani soldiers also serving the UN.

(When the US troops landed in Somalia to punish the warlord Eidid, the regiment contained Eidid’s son in it, who was an American citizen! He was hurriedly sent back. The son is now the third senior-most minister in the internationally recognised government the mullahs had ousted!)

Eidid invited Pakistani journalists with Al Qaeda money. The top Urdu columnists arrived on the scene where he had killed the Pakistani soldiers.

Urdu columnist Rafiq Dogar wrote a book on the visit and said how he loved the dead American ‘gora’ being dragged around by the Somali ‘technicals’. He did not like the fact that Pakistan had sent its troops there.

(The writer was present at the book launch.)

Pakistani troops had brought relief to Eidid’s people in Mogadishu through medical care and food. He killed them out of sheer savagery at the behest of Al Qaeda.

<b>There were reports that Osama had sent boys from Harkatul Mujahideen from Sudan to help Aidid and that they could have fired the bullets that killed the Pakistani troops. Harkat was then united and its two leaders were very close to Osama</b>.

Harkat’s leader Fazlur Rehman Khaleel had become famous for having co-signed a fatwa of death against America with Osama bin Laden. The other leader Masud Azhar was a bright pupil of Mufti Shamzai of Karachi. He was a good fund-raiser too.

Amir Mir writing in the foreword of A to Z of Jehadi Organisations in Pakistan by Amir Rana (Mashal, Lahore) presents extracts from the Indian interrogation report after Masud Azhar’s arrest in Delhi.

Masud Azhar told the Indian interrogators that he was against the presence of the Pakistani troops in Somalia under the UN auspices. He wrote a book on the subject and criticised Pakistan’s policy of assigning troops to UN missions.

He distributed 5,000 copies of the book in Pakistan. A seminar held in Islamabad in which many intellectuals – including, unknowingly, Eqbal Ahmad – spoke out against the policy of sending troops under the UN auspices but actually under American command.

Masud Azhar had written that Americans troops in Somalia were protected by Pakistani troops as if they were their servants.

He was in Somalia in 1993, according to his own book. Later, he traveled to India and was caught in 1994 in Anant Nag in Held Kashmir while trying to coordinate his militia. His route had described this pattern: on a Pakistani passport to Saudi Arabia and from there to Dhaka on a Portuguese passport, and from Dhaka to New Delhi.

He was sprung from the Indian jail together with his friend Umar Sheikh in 1999-2000 by Al Qaeda with many entities working together. An Indian plane was hijacked to Kandahar where the Taliban exchanged them for the passengers. Umar Sheikh was later sentenced to death for his part in the murder of Daniel Pearl.

<b>Al Qaeda wants a state from where it can operate. When Osama feared that he might lose Afghanistan he tried through Zarqawi in Herat and Mulla Krekar of Ansarul Islam in Iraq to create a base in Kurdistan where, as luck would have it, Barzani was willing to help but not Talabani. The plan did not work out</b>.
(Kurd cleric Mullah Krekar taught at the International Islamic University in Islamabad and is now in Norway as an asylum-seeker but wanted for terrorism in Turkey.)

Now Somalia is the objective. It conveniently has territorial claims on Kenya and Ethiopia and can expand if unified under Islam. But the Americans are already in Ethiopia training its troops for a ‘pre-emptive’ operation.

<b>Ethiopia has a population of 75 million divided equally between Muslims and Christians, but the Christians rule. It received $600 million in aid from the US in 2005, the same as Pakistan.</b>

<b>Osama bin Laden’s message said: ‘Somalia is our safe haven; Ethiopia is in the way’. Ethiopia has made this statement the casus belli for its invasion.</b>

The internationally recognised government was in a city called Baidoa and the Islamists were not able to take it. The Ethiopians have gone in and the Baidoa government has returned to Mogadishu.

<b>The mullah judges with their Al Qaeda fighters first fled south to Kismayo, then to the Kenyan border. From the reports it appears that South Waziristan may have sent in its sons to fight the Americans in Somalia.</b>

Let’s hope, contrary to such reports, that there are no Pakistanis in Somalia. Soon however many warriors from all over the Islamic world are expected to get there. Because Ethiopia is Christian-ruled and is being helped by America.
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