Wednesday, October 4, 2006; 7:24 PM
The militia reached Moode Moode on Tuesday night, said local militia leader Mohammed Ibrahim Bilal. The group has started 24-hour patrols in the area, he said.
"Our aim was to help the local residents in their fighting of bandits and to lift blockages from the road linking Baidoa to Mogadishu," Bilal told The Associated Press.
Abdirahman Dinari, a spokesman for the transitional government, described the militia's advance as "a provocative action."
A transitional government was formed in 2004 with U.N. help in hopes of restoring order after years of lawlessness in Somalia, which has not had an effective national government since 1991. But it has struggled to assert authority, while the Islamic movement seized the capital, Mogadishu, in June and now controls much of the south.
The Islamic group's strict and often severe interpretation of Islam raises memories of Afghanistan's Taliban, which was ousted by a U.S.-led campaign for harboring Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida fighters.
The United States has accused the group of sheltering suspects in the 1998 al-Qaida bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Earlier Wednesday, Islamic leaders held a rally that drew thousands of mostly women and students in the port city of Kismayo, and vowed to wage holy war against any group that tries to stop their military advances.
"The time for ambiguity and hypocrisy has ended. By God, we will wage a holy war against our enemies," senior Islamic official Mohammed Wali Sheik Ahmed told a crowd of at least 5,000. The militia seized Kismayo, one of the last remaining ports outside their control and Somalia's third-largest city, last week without a fight.
Source: AP, Oct. 4, 2006