Foreign jihadists join local fighters in lawless Somalia

NAIROBI: Egged on by Osama bin Laden and drawn in by Ethiopia's pullout, foreign jihadists have flocked to Somalia in recent months, joining forces with local fighters to turn the country into an Al-Qaeda haven. Somalia now shelters an estimated 450 foreign fighters who are working with the Shebab, a home-grown hardline Islamist group that has spearheaded a bloody insurgency since 2006. While foreign fighters wanted for links to Al-Qaeda have long used Somalia as a backyard, their numbers have swollen dramatically in 2009, experts say.
"There were maybe 100 foreigners last year but now our estimate is up to 450," said Ismail Haji Noor, a former Somali security official who has established a secular militia bent on rooting out the Shebab and their foreign allies. Noor said the foreign jihadists come from the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia and often enter the country on regular airlines from the northern semi-autonomous state of Somaliland. Most of them are concentrated in Garowe, in the northern breakaway state of Puntland, and the southern towns of Baidoa, Merka and Kismayo.
"The risk is being taken increasingly seriously that they will look outside Somalia for their operations now," said one Nairobi-based diplomat. Stripped of their arch-enemy Ethiopia, which ended its two-year military occupation in January, the Shebab have revamped their organization and moved closer to Al-Qaeda, intelligence officials said. A 10-member "cabinet" includes several known Somali members who have trained in Afghanistan, including Mukhtar Robow who has been the group's main spokesman. But it is also believed to include several foreigners, from Saudi Arabia and Sudan, as well as Fazul Abdullah, a Comoran-born Al-Qaeda operative who is wanted over the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
"They will be targeting Kenya, Djibouti, Ethiopia. Western powers will focus their efforts on protecting those neighboring countries instead of tackling the problems inside Somalia," Noor warned. He said Somalia's new moderate Islamist president, Sharif Sheikh Ahmad, needed to be urgently shored up if the threat was to be neutralized...MORE..http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=100428
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