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Somali Islamists dismiss UN report as 'fabrication'
Somalias powerful Islamists on Wednesday dismissed as fabrication a UN report which says they are receiving military support from seven African and Middle Eastern nations and international Islamic militants. An advance copy of the 80-page report to the UN Security Council, obtained by Reuters, paints a detailed picture of foreign interests it says are allied both to Somalias interim government and its Islamist rivals. Written by four security experts from the United States, Kenya, Belgium and Colombia, it says at least seven nations are providing arms and military supplies to the Islamists, who aim to rule the anarchic nation through sharia, Islamic law. It says three are arming the weak but Western-backed government. This is very much a fabrication and doesnt have any credibility, Islamist leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who is on a UN list of al Qaeda associates, told Reuters. The UN will lose its credibility by releasing this kind of report and by the way they collect information, he said. The Islamists, who seized Mogadishu in June from US-backed warlords and now dominate a swathe of south-central Somalia, are vying with the government for control of the Horn of Africa nation. A third round of peace talks in Sudan between the two sides failed two weeks ago and many fear war could spread around the Horn and possibly further south into Kenya and beyond. The primary violators of a widely ignored 1992 arms ban on Somalia, the report says, are Ethiopia and Eritrea, who are respectively backing the government and Islamists.
Posted by: Fred 2006-11-16 |
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| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=172148 |