The meeting in Istanbul on Tuesday follows a "call by Turkey to help the people of Somalia," said the largest pan-Islamic body, which is based in Soddy Arabia. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu called last week on the 57-member OIC to meet to intervene in Somalia, the Turkish Anatolia news agency said.
Member states gathered in Istanbul last month to coordinate an emergency response to the devastating drought in Somalia. The OIC would start by distributing aid to some 40,000 people in the Afgooye corridor near Mogadishu under an agreement with the World Food Programme, Ihsanoglu said at the time.
The United Nations
...where theory meets practice and practice loses...
last month officially declared famine in two areas of southern Somalia, as the world slowly mobilised to help 12 million people battling hunger in the region's worst drought in 60 years. Tens of thousands have died.
Parts of Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Djibouti are also hit by the drought. Somalia's President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed promised on Wednesday to rid the country of the faceless myrmidons who are fighting to overthrow his administration and blocking food aid to millions of people facing starvation.
Ahmed was speaking four days after a
l-Shabaab... Harakat ash-Shabaab al-Mujahidin aka the Mujahideen Youth Movement. It was originally the youth movement of the Islamic Courts, now pretty much all of what's left of it. They are aligned with al-Qaeda but operate more like the Afghan or Pakistani Taliban. The organization's current leader is Ibrahim Haji Jama Mee'aad, also known as Ibrahim
al-Afghani. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a Kenyan al-Qaeda member, is considered the group's military leader...
pulled most of its forces out of the Somali capital amid signs of deepening rifts among its senior commanders. "As long as they are in Somali territory, even an inch, I will not rest," Ahmed told a news conference after meeting Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete in Dar es Salaam. "Our determination is to clear them out," he said.
Some regional allies have criticised Ahmed's failure to quash the insurgency and push through a new constitution designed to better spread political power among the country's powerful clans and regions.