July 10, 2009
Somali Islamist insurgent fighters beheaded seven people accused of abandoning their religion and of espionage, residents said Friday, in the largest mass execution since the Islamists were chased from power two and a half years ago.
The execution follows weeks of bloody fighting for control of the capital and at a time of mounting concern over the influx of hundreds of extremist foreign fighters into the war-ravaged Horn of Africa nation.
Resident Madey Doyow said he saw seven headless bodies in a truck being guarded by militia members in the southwestern town of Baidoa.
“The people who were guarding the vehicle told us they were beheaded for violating Islamic law,” he said. The victims had come from different parts of the southwestern Bay and Bakool regions, he said.
A woman named Miriam, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her from reprisals, sobbed as she said in a phone call that four bodies, including her husband’s, had been brought to the police station in Baidoa. The location of the other three was unclear.
She called the killing of her husband inhuman.
Hawa, a woman who also wanted her full name withheld, was at the police station in Baidoa along with other families who had been informed a relative was executed. She told the AP that her brother had been missing for about 20 days after being abducted from his house by masked men, and that she had just been informed that he had been beheaded.
Al-Shabab militia officials told her that the seven had been accused of either renouncing the Islamic religion or spying for the transitional government, she said.
The executions fit a broader pattern of torture and unlawful killings by various factions of the militia, said Benedicte Goderiaux, a Somalia researcher for Amnesty International.
In Kismayo, a southern port city under al-Shabab control, a 13-year-old girl was stoned to death last October after being accused of adultery and a man also had a hand amputated after being accused of theft.
Last month the militia amputated a hand and foot each from four men accused of theft in the capital of Mogadishu. Another man accused of rape and murder was stoned to death in a town south of the capital last month.
“It’s difficult to know if the unlawful killings and torture is increasing or it’s the reports that are increasing,” said Goderiaux.
“It’s definitely linked to al-Shabab wanting to show or portray themselves as restoring law and order in the region they control … it’s also linked to them wanting to terrorize the population under their control under the guise of applying sharia law,”
The killings come as African Union officials are deliberating over broadening the mandate of an under-resourced and undermanned peacekeeping mission in the country’s capital, and as the U.N. human rights chief said both the insurgents and government troops may be committing war crimes.
UPDATE: Atlas reader Marc informs of the following:
I spent a year on the Horn of Africa. I was there when the Ethiopians entered Somalia, came through Baidoa, and into Mogadishu. I was intrigued, if only morbidly so, by al-Shaba’ab. I looked at their formation as and reputation as the militant wing of the Islamic Courts. I considered their training regimes. I read their rhetoric. I watched their stated claims to fame as fighters against the puppet government. I called them a terrorist group. The State Department then sent me a personal letter to stop calling the youth group a terrorist group. One year alter, I felt vindicated when the group was added to the Terrorist Watch List.
2 responses so far ↓
centurean2 // July 11, 2009 at 1:18 pm |
centurean2 // July 11, 2009 at 1:22 pm |
And for our next trick…”
- “… we will eliminate world poverty and hunger!”
- “… we will change the earths rotation to its opposite direction!”
- “… we wil turn water into wine!”
Idiots!
Mind you, the more astute among the western leaders must be aware that the global temperature has been trending downwards over the last year. So they should know that warming will be limited to within 2 degrees centigrade by natural processes alone. That they are still going along with the utterly insane, self-destructive insanity of a reduction of 80% of CO2 emissions tells us that this whole charade is not about impending climate disaster. It is about increased government control, pure and simple.
[UPDATE001] Our own intrepid PM, Jan Peter Balkenende, is also afflicted with the collective Jesus-syndrome: Balkenende content with climate deal G8 (NL). Will nobody rid us of these blathering fools?
http://WWW.KLEINVERZET.BLOGSPOT.COM