According to Somali officials, one of the Somalis captured by Kenyan soldiers may be Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, the second in command of the defeated Islamist Court Union forces.
Gen. Ismail Qasim Naji of the Somali transitional government said that Sheikh Sharif’s briefcase was recently discovered at a jungle hideout in southwestern Somalia.
“It had some important documents in it,” General Naji said at a press conference in Mogadishu, Somalia’s seaside capital. When a reporter asked what they were, the general replied, “Top secret.”
Ethiopian-led troops routed the Islamist forces that controlled most of Somalia, including the capital, last month after the Islamists mounted an attack on Baidoa, the seat of the country’s transitional government.
The American military jumped in last week, bombing two areas near the Somalia-Kenya border where the Islamist leaders and several terrorist suspects were believed to be hiding. A small contingent of American special operations soldiers are in the country to help track down suspects and identify any bodies.
The Islamists have been essentially cornered between the advancing Ethiopian-led army, the heavily defended Kenyan border and the Indian Ocean, where American warships are patrolling offshore.
United Nations officials said that the Kenyan government is considering whether to offer political asylum to the Islamist leaders, in the interests of bringing the fighting in Somalia to a close. Somalia’s transitional government has agreed to give amnesty to rank and file Islamist fighters who lay down their arms, but they say they want the top Islamists handed over to them for prosecution.
“Any members of the upper echelons of the Islamists who still pose a threat to our security will face due process of the law in Somalia,” said Abdirizak Adam Hassan, chief of staff for the transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed. “As for terrorists, we will give them to the Americans or the U.N.”
In Baidoa, the inland city where the transitional parliament still meets, lawmakers removed the speaker of the parliament, Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan, from his post today.
Mr. Adan, an illiterate livestock trader, had been one of the most powerful men in Somalia. But he fell out of favor with President Yusuf and the prime minister, Ali Mohammed Gedi, after he tried to arrange a peace deal between the Islamists and the transitional government and demanded that Ethiopian troops leave Somalia.
Members of parliament accused him of treason and voted 183 to 9 to remove him. No replacement has yet been named.
Mr. Adan rejected the vote, telling a Somali radio station today, “The country is illegally occupied by Ethiopia, and the M.P.’s were probably forced to vote against me.”
Source: NY Times, Jan 17, 2007