Somali Islamists say U.S. terror listing forges unity
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Islamist insurgents in Somalia say their inclusion on a U.S. terrorism list will help recruiting and has spurred them to strengthen ties with other groups blacklisted by Washington.
"We were not terrorists," rebel commander Mukhtar Ali Robow told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.
"But now we've been designated ... we have been forced to seek out and unite with any Muslims on the list against the United States," he said late on Thursday.
U.S. officials say Robow's al Shabaab, the militant wing of a sharia courts group that ruled most of southern Somalia for the second half of 2006, is closely affiliated with al Qaeda.
This week, the U.S. government designated it a terrorist organization alongside groups like Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and Lebanon's Hezbollah.
Somalia's Western-backed interim government and its Ethiopian military allies have faced an Iraq-style insurgency of assassinations, grenade attacks and roadside bombings since they routed the Islamic courts group from the capital in December 2006.
It wants a fullscale U.N. peacekeeping mission to help it fend off the rebels and relieve an under-funded African Union force of just 2,600 soldiers from Uganda and Burundi.
The top U.N. envoy to Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, told Security Council members on Thursday they had a clear responsibility to get involved in a country where there were widespread abuses of human rights and humanitarian law.
The council's 15 members agree things are dire, but many are reluctant to send U.N. troops to a place of bitter memories of the "Black Hawk Down" battle in 1993 that effectively wrecked a U.S.-U.N. peace mission.
AL QAEDA LINKS
Underlining the dangers, three local soldiers, a doctor and an 11-year-old girl died in violence in Mogadishu on Thursday.
Residents said the child was killed by a stray bullet, while the main anesthetist at the SOS Children's Hospital died when government troops opened fire on his car.
Rebel gunmen also briefly seized a government checkpoint after one battle near the capital's sprawling Bakara Market.
"A huge number of people supporting the insurgents then came onto the streets shouting 'God is great' and smashing the soldiers' small booths by the road," said witness Omar Ismail.
Washington says the Islamic courts hosted al Qaeda suspects wanted for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and it says many al Shabaab members trained and fought with Osama bin Laden's group in Afghanistan.
"We want to be very, very clear that this is not a designation against opposition groups," Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States' number two diplomat for Africa, told Reuters.
"Al Shabaab has tried to conflate the anti-Ethiopian agenda with their terrorism agenda and it's very dangerous," she said.
"There are lots of people in Somalia who have a nationalist agenda ... and I think people are not aware of just how strong the al Shabaab links with al Qaeda are."
When the sharia courts group was in power in Mogadishu, Washington focused on another leader it says has al Qaeda ties.
Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, now in exile in Eritrea, told Reuters the U.S. designation of al Shabaab was wrong.
"The Americans labeled me a terrorist and God knows that was a lie," he said. "I didn't do anything to them ... it's the habit of Americans who found themselves rich and powerful and handed the leadership of their country to crazy people."
(Additional reporting by Bryson Hull in Nairobi; Writing by Daniel Wallis; editing by Tim Pearce)
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