Militants on terrorist list 'thrilled'

2008-03-20 10:17

Mogadishu - Somali Islamic militants welcomed being added to the United States list of foreign terrorist organisations, saying on Wednesday that they only wished the designation had come sooner.

Also Wednesday, witnesses said heavy fighting in Somalia's restive capital killed at least eight people, including three Ethiopian soldiers.

An extremist group that controlled much of southern Somalia for six months before being driven out in December 2006 by the country's Western-backed government and its Ethiopian allies had since launched a ferocious insurgency.

The US state department had announced a day earlier that it had added the military wing of the extremist movement, known as the Council of Islamic Courts, to its list of foreign terrorist organisations.

'I am pleased to be on the list'

Some members of the military wing, called al-Shabab or "the youth," were affiliated with al-Qaeda, the department said.

"We are happy that the US put us on its list of terrorists, a name given to pure Muslims, who are strong and clear in their religious position, by the West," Sheik Muqtar Robow, al-Shabab's spokesperson, said.

He said he was pleased to be on a list that included Islamic militants - "our brothers" - in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We would have been happy to be the first but now we are unhappy that we are the last," Robow said. He accused the US of targeting his group because it was "fighting against Ethiopia, a Christian nation that had invaded our country".

Earlier on Wednesday, top Council of Islamic Courts leader Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys had denied links between terrorists and al-Shabab and said the militants "are part of the coalition for the re-liberation of Somalia ...."

US military stages attacks on 'extremists'

Aweys said: "The US policy toward Somalia is always wrong and twisted. They made the wrong decision in 2006 when they backed the Ethiopian invasion, and they are wrong to designate part of the resistance as terrorists."

Designated terror organisations could not legally receive material or resources from Americans, and their property and interests in the US were blocked.

Officials in Somalia's ineffectual transitional government said al-Shabab's leader, Aden Hashi Ayro, was trained in Afghanistan before the September 11 2001 attacks on the US and heads al-QaEda's cell in Somalia.

The US military had staged several attacks on suspected extremists in Somalia over the past year.

The US Navy targeted a Kenyan suspected in the 1998 embassy bombings in the last missile strike earlier this month.

- SAPA