Monday, October 23, 2006
By Andrew Cawthorne
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Horn of Africa power Ethiopia warned on Monday it would intervene if Somali Islamists attacked the interim government amid a standoff over a key town that has heightened fears of all-out war.
"We will defend the government if attacked by the jihadists," senior government official Bereket Simon said.
"If they try to overthrow the legitimate government, we will help the government," Bereket, a minister without portfolio and key ally of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, told Reuters at his office.
Heavily armed Islamist fighters on Sunday had gathered near the strategic town of Buur Hakaba -- 30 km (20 miles) from the government’s base in Baidoa -- after allies of theirs were chased out by government troops over the weekend.
Islamist security chief Sheikh Yusuf Mohamed Siad, known as Inda’ade, said his fighters had retaken the outpost on Monday but refused to give any details.
"The town is back in our hands as of this morning," he told Reuters by phone.
There was no independent confirmation and the government had no immediate comment.
Analysts and diplomats fear conflict between the Islamists and the government could drag the volatile Horn of Africa region into war and give Muslim militants a new battlefront -- especially if Ethiopia enters the fray directly.
They fear that would spur Addis Ababa’s arch-rival Eritrea to further back the Islamists -- which Asmara denies doing -- and hand extremists cause to attack what many Somalis believe is a Christian imperialist power backed by the United States.
The Islamists have long accused Ethiopia of sending troops into Somalia, and witnesses have reported seeing Ethiopian military units moving inside the nation. Addis Ababa denies sending anything but military advisers.
Citing the sensitivity of the situation, Bereket declined to say if Addis Ababa would respond militarily to an attack on Buur Hakaba, or only -- as it has stated in the past -- if the Islamists went to Baidoa.
"They have been threatening to continue with the destabilisation of the Transitional Federal Government, they have been declaring jihad on Ethiopia, and they have become magnets for all sorts of terrorist groups converging on Somalia," he added.
Ethiopia’s support for Yusuf’s government was only putting into practice international backing expressed by the African Union, United Nations and countries in the region, he said.
Borne out of sharia courts which brought a measure of order to anarchic Mogadishu, the Islamists took the capital and a swathe of southern Somalia in June.
Their rise has dented the aspirations of the Western-backed Yusuf government to impose central rule on Somalia for the first time since a military dictator was ousted in 1991.
While the Islamists say their priority is to bring law and order to Somalia and have no intentions beyond their borders, critics say they harbour al Qaeda-linked extremists and are eying Ethiopia’s ethnically Somali region of Ogaden.
"They have been threatening to continue with the destabilisation of the Transitional Federal Government, they have been declaring jihad on Ethiopia, and they have become magnets for all sorts of terrorist groups converging on Somalia," he added.
Ethiopia’s support for Yusuf’s government was only putting into practice international backing expressed by the African Union, United Nations and countries in the region, he said.
Borne out of sharia courts which brought a measure of order to anarchic Mogadishu, the Islamists took the capital and a swathe of southern Somalia in June.
Their rise has dented the aspirations of the Western-backed Yusuf government to impose central rule on Somalia for the first time since a military dictator was ousted in 1991.
While the Islamists say their priority is to bring law and order to Somalia and have no intentions beyond their borders, critics say they harbour al Qaeda-linked extremists and are eying Ethiopia’s ethnically Somali region of Ogaden.
Source: Reuters, Oct. 23, 2006