UPDF faces al Qaeda threat in Somalia

FOR 13-year-old Mohamed Ismaeli, the Ugandan nurse of the African Union peacekeeping force, must seem like an angel in the midst of Mogadishu’s madness. She carefully bandages the stump that remains of his left leg after a bullet hit him on the way from school. His friend, Abdukadir, died in the cross-fire between the Somali government forces and Islamist insurgents, known as al Shabaab. Despite being in great pain, Mohamed smiles at the Ugandan woman who cares for him like a mother, in a place where for the first time in his life he feels safe. His house in Karan, in the northern part of the city, was hit by mortars twice in the last few months, he narrates, killing two of his sisters and three of his brothers. Mohamed is only one out of over 2,000 war-wounded the Ugandan medical team pulled through in the last two years. “When there is fighting, we get very many cases,” says Dr. Joseph Asea, the force medical officer. “We can have up to 50 to 70 patients in one day, mostly with gunshot wounds.” Largely ignored by the rest of the world, the 2,700 Ugandan peacekeepers are doing more than saving lives in the world’s most smashed-up capital. They have also protected the Somali government and key institutions like the port, the airport and state house, and trained the new Somali army and Police. All observers now agree that without AMISOM, as the African Union mission is dubbed, there would be no government in Somalia. Al Shabaab With a minimum of funding, equipment and soldiers, the three Ugandan battalions have kept at bay one of the most feared terrorist groups currently operating in Africa. Al Shabaab, the youth wing of the Islamic Courts, are a product of the lawlessness and extreme violence that have gripped the strategic country at the Indian Ocean for the last two decades. An entire generation, those born after 1990, has never known a functional government or a society with a constitution and a rule of law. Denied an education, cut off from the outside world, overcome by a sense of injustice, despair and anger, these redundant Muslim youth were easy prey for al Qaeda. ..more..http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/13/689234