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| Africa Horn |
| Somali government offers amnesty to Shebab rebels |
| 2011-08-10 |
| [Dawn] Somalia's embattled government offered an open amnesty on Tuesday to Islamist Shebab fighters after the rebels made a surprise withdrawal from the famine-struck capital over the weekend. The al Qaeda affiliated hard boyz have waged a bloody war since 2007 to topple the Western-backed transitional government, which they had hemmed in to a portion of Mogadishu. "We offer an amnesty -- put down your weapons and your guns, and come and join the people and your society," said Abdirahman Osman, a front man for the transitional government. "For those who have been misled by the senior commanders, now is the time to end the war." The bully boy fighters, who had controlled around half of Mogadishu, abandoned their positions on Saturday but some units remained active within the capital. Fighting was reported as rebel remnants clashed with African Union ...a union consisting of 53 African states, most run by dictators of one flavor or another. The only all-African state not in the AU is Morocco. Established in 2002, the AU is the successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which was even less successful... -backed government troops after the pullout. Sporadic gunfire was heard in the city on Tuesday morning, according to an AFP correspondent. Government officials celebrated the hardline rebel pullout but the Shebab said it was merely "a change of military tactics." The 9,000-strong AU force (AMISOM) and government troops have meanwhile reinforced their hold over former rebel positions in an effort to allow more aid into the famine-struck capital on Tuesday. "The hard boyz have been preventing the provision of food to hungry Somalis and this has opened up the opportunity to help many more people," said Boubacar Gaoussou Diarra, the AU special representative to Somalia, in a statement released late Monday. AMISOM however warned people intending to return to former Shebab-controlled areas of the "high possibility" of "roadside kabooms and pockets of remaining bully boy fighters," Diarra said. The UN Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said it was assessing how the rebel withdrawal would open aid group access to the war-torn city, to which about 100,000 people have decamped in the past two months to escape extreme drought. "Although it is too early to know what the impact on the overall situation is, humanitarian actors are assessing the ability to operate and/or scale up activities," it said a statement Tuesday. The United Nations ...an idea whose time has gone... has officially declared famine in Somalia for the first time this century, including in Mogadishu and four southern Somali regions. "Famine... is expected to spread across all regions of the south in the coming four to six weeks," OCHA warned. "Cases of acute watery diarrhoea are increasing across Somalia," it added. Much of southern Somalia -- including most of the regions declared to be in famine -- is still controlled by the Shebab rebels. The UN's food monitoring unit has described Somalia as facing the most severe humanitarian crisis in the world and Africa's worst food security crisis since the country's 1991-1992 famine. Parts of Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya and Uganda have also been hit by the Horn of Africa's worst drought in decades. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 See also WORLD NEWS > [Spero] SOMALI FAMINE COULD CAUSE AL-SHABAAB TO SPLINTER. ARTIC = AL-Shabaab likely to be WEAKENED, BUT STIIL VIOLENT SAVE FOR ITS TACTICS BECOM MORE UNPREDICTABLE. IOW, Al-Shabaab = post-Osama, Zawahiri-led "Core" Al-Qaeda in AFPAK. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2011-08-10 00:20 |