News from Associatd Press and Shabelle reports that the Al Qaeda-linked leader of the Islamists in Somalia has announced his true agenda - expanding into neighboring countries.
Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, speaking on Shabelle Radio late on Friday night, said that his forces will be working to regain "lost territory", which has for more than a generation been incorporated into the national boundaries of Kenya and Ethiopia. He said: "It is unbelievable that a country population that is like one family to be divided into 10 parts. As Islamic Courts, we will not accept divisions and we will gain back the Somali provinces forcefully annexed to Ethiopia and Kenya."
"We will leave no stone unturned to integrate our Somali brothers in Kenya and Ethiopia and restore their freedom to live with their ancestors in Somalia,", the Islamist leader said. He referred to the expanded regions which he envisioned as "Greater Somalia".
Historically, when a nation decides it should be "greater", as in "Greater Serbia", wars and attrition have followed as a matter of course. Somalia's Islamists have made threats of war against Ethiopia already, on July 21 and again in October.
Aweys also denied that Islamists from Somalia had been sent to the Middle East recently, to fight alongside Hizbollah against Israel. He also defended the ban upon Khat, the narcotic which is popularly chewed in the Horn of Africa as a mild stimulant.
On Thursday in Bar Udah district of Mogadishu, a 13-year old boy was shot dead and others were wounded by Islamists firing on protesters in Mogadishu, who were agitating against the khat ban. Following the protest, a curfew was imposed on Mogadishu. In his interview with Shabelle Radio, Aweys did not specify how long the curfew would be maintained.
Aweys was one of the founders of the terror group Al-Ittihad al-Islami, which is placed on a British list of proscribed organizations. The United States maintains he is linked to Al Qaeda, a claim he denies. Aweys has a personal grudge against the leader of the transitional government as president Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed had driven out Al-Ittihad al-Islami from its base in Puntland, northern Somalia, in the 1990s.
Historically, Somalia in its current state has only existed since 1960. Italian Somaliland became rebranded as "Somalia" and given autonomy in 1956 and in 1960 this merged with British-ruled regions to become the modern independent state. Before then, it had not been an independent "nation" since the 19th century, and then it was a grouping of tribally-oriented states which had come into existence in the 16th century, following the disintegration of the Sultanate of Adel in 1542.
In the time of the Egyptians, the region now called Somalia was believed to be the Land of Punt. A bas-relief from the tomb of Queen Hatsheput (1516-1481 BC) depicts the King of Punt, Parihou, with his bizarrely-shaped wife, Queen Ati (pictured), commemorating an expedition to bring spices and herbs from the region.
One indigenous people of the Horn of Africa region, who have lived there for thousands of years, are the Oromo, who speak a Cushitic language. In the 11th century, the Darood Somali arrived from Arabia, under the leadership of Sheikh Ismail Jabarti. In the 13th century, Sheikh Isaaq arrived from Arabia, founding the Isaaq clan. The Darood and Isaaq gradually displaced the Oromo from the region now known as Somalia as they grew in numbers. The first mention of the name "Somali" comes from an Ethiopian poem from the 15h century.
In 1839, British forces took over Aden, and looked to take over the Somali coastal region. Though Egypt took over some regions of what is now the Somali coast, by 1887, the northern region of the Somali coast was under British control, with a protectorate proclaimed over Somaliland. France had taken over Djibouti on the coast, south of Eritrea, and looked to take over parts of Somalia, and the Italians took control of other parts of Somali territory.
The only region in Ethiopia which could be classed as ethnically "Somali" is Ogaden, which in 1977 suffered an invasion led by the socialist dictator Muhammad Siad Barre, who ruled from 1969 to 1991. In 1978, Ethiopia expelled the Somali military from the region of Ogaden with Cuban and Soviet assistance.
Siad Barre claimed one of the five points in the star of the Somali flag represented the "unredeemed" territories in Kenya's North East province, Ogaden and Djibouti.
There have been border disputes with Kenya stemming back to independence. Last month, Kenya reinforced its troops at the border, adjoining the Gedo region of Somalia at the El-Wakh border pass.
Siad Barre, whose ousting led to the 15 years of warlord-led tribal chaos (despite the August 2004 institution of a UN-sponsored "transitional" goverment) had tried to expand Somalia into a "Greater Somalia".
Somalia is riven by tribal ties, and the Islamism of the Islamic Courts attempts to unify the fractured nation under one banner, even though this was described by Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed last month as a "jihadist wing.... under the banner of the black flag of the Taliban."
Backed by Islamists in Eritrea and Yemen, and also Al Qaeda, it appears that Somalia under Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys intends to revive the expansionist intentions of Siad Barre. And the Horn of Africa, which has been a target of Al Qaeda for several years, will become embroiled in a new war of Islamist imperialism.http://www.westernresistance.com
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