American Diplomat to Visit Strife-Torn Somali Capital
Jeffrey Gettleman, The New York Times, January 6, 2007
KISMAYO, Somalia, Jan. 5 — The State Department’s top diplomat for Africa plans
to visit Mogadishu, the violence-scarred Somali capital, on Sunday, American
officials said Friday. It would be the first time in more than a decade that a
high-ranking United States official has set foot there.
But Al Qaeda’s
second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, urged the world’s Muslims on Friday to turn
Somalia into a battlefield and use suicide attacks.
These developments were
part of Somalia’s transformation after Ethiopian-led forces ousted the once
powerful Islamist movement from the capital last week and helped install a
potentially viable government there for the first time in over 16
years.
American officials said the schedule for the diplomat, Jendayi E.
Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, was still tentative,
but that she planned to be in Mogadishu for four hours to meet with officials of
the transitional government and leading Somali intellectuals.
The United
States has had a minimal presence in the country since its diplomats were
withdrawn in the fall of 1994, nearly a year after 18 Americans were killed
during an ill-fated attempt to capture a warlord in Mogadishu. In his speech on
Friday, Mr. Zawahri urged Muslim fighters to wage a holy guerrilla war in
Somalia. “I speak to you today as the crusader Ethiopian invasion forces violate
the soil of the beloved Muslim Somalia,” he said in an audio recording on a Web
site that has featured Qaeda messages before. “Launch ambushes, land mines,
raids and suicidal attacks until you consume them as the lions eat their
prey.”
It was not the first time that Muslim extremists have called for a
holy war in Somalia.
Ethiopia has a long Christian history, and Somalia’s
Islamist leaders had been trying for months to rally outside support by
portraying the Ethiopians as infidel invaders and urging Muslims worldwide to
turn Somalia into the third front for jihad, after Iraq and Afghanistan.
In
the end, though, Western intelligence officials said that only a few hundred
foreign fighters heeded the call, and that they seemed to make little
difference. The Islamist forces, made up of mostly untrained teenage troops,
were routed by Ethiopian soldiers in one battle after another and lost in one
week all the territory they had gained in the past six months.
Somalia’s
transitional government is now in loose control of most of the country and
Western diplomats, including Ms. Frazer, are urging African nations to quickly
put together a peacekeeping force before Somalia reverts to
anarchy.
Officials from Ethiopia, one of the poorest nations in the world,
have said that they do not have the resources to keep soldiers here much longer.
Ethiopia has justified its intervention by saying that Somalia’s Islamists were
a regional menace.
Ms. Frazer met Friday with Kenyan and Somali officials in
Nairobi to discuss the details of the peacekeeping force. Uganda has already
volunteered troops, and Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania have indicated they
might also send forces.
Ms. Frazer was to travel to Yemen and Djibouti on
Saturday to pursue the matter.
In Mogadishu, the transitional government was
struggling to collect weapons. Earlier in the week, Ali Muhammad Gedi, the
transitional prime minister, announced that Thursday was the deadline for all
militias and gunmen to surrender their arms. Only a handful have complied and
the deadline has been pushed back to Saturday.
As for the Islamists, Somali
officials said Friday that the last remnants of their forces were cornered in a
remote area of southern Somalia, south of Kismayo. Somali officials said they
expected the conflict to end soon, though the Islamists have vowed to fight on
as an underground insurgency.
Mohammed Ibrahim and Yusuuf Maxamuud contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.