Kenya rejects Somalia’s troop appeal to fight militant

SOMALIA’s president wants thousands of troops trained in Kenya to be deployed to Mogadishu for an upcoming offensive against Islamist militants, but Kenya has declined the request.


The refusal adds yet another complication for a military campaign that has already been delayed several times, officials said.
The fact that Kenya could veto Somali wishes for the deployment of its own troops underscores that the Kenyan government wields power in the neighboring country, which has a weak, UN- backed government.
In a March 21 letter that the Associated Press obtained a copy of, Somali President Sharif Sheik Ahmed asked Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki for Kenya’s support for a plan to transfer control of 2500 Somali troops trained in Kenya to the current defence minister.
That would mean the troops would be moved from the Somali-Kenya border to Mogadishu, large parts of which are controlled by al-Shabab, a militant group linked to al- Qaeda.
Kenya’s president rejected the plan, based on fears that if the troops were sent to Mogadishu, Kenya’s porous frontier with Somalia would be vulnerable to cross-border incursions, said a Somali official who spoke on condition of anonymity .
Some of the troops trained in Kenya were rumoured to be Kenyan nationals of Somali origin.
Kenyan government spokesperson Alfred Mutua declined to comment.
“Kibaki respects Somalia’s president and his government, but when it comes to national security, Kenya’s interest comes first,” said Abdullahi Hassan, a political analyst and lecturer at Nairobi’s Kenyatta University.
It is not known if the issue would cause further delays to an offensive aimed at restoring Somali government control to large parts of the country and hitting a radical movement that has imposed harsh justice, including stonings and amputations.
The offensive has been pushed back repeatedly, in part because of a lack of military resources.
Kenya, which hosts hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees in the northeastern part of the country, mediated a two- year peace process that led to the formation of Somalia’s fragile government.
“The whole training exercise was a Kenyan-led initiative that involved elements within the Somali government. It was part of Kenya’s overall military containment strategy against al-Shabab, and it does not want to lose control of that process despite its support for the Somali government,” said Rashid Abdi of the International Crisis Group.
For more than five months, Kenya has been training the more than 2500 Somali troops. The initial plan was for them to be deployed to the border to eliminate threats posed by al-Shabab, said clan elder Sheik Ali Gure, who helped recruit the troops from three Somali regions near Kenya.
Al-Shabab controls large swaths of southern and central Somalia.
A UN Monitoring Group reported last month that the Somali military was dominated by a command structure based on clan loyalties. The dust up between Kenya and Somalia over troop deployment underscores those clan arrangements.
Gure warned that if the Kenyan-trained troops were transferred to Mogadishu, Somali clans along the border – who want the troops to stay in their regions to take on al- Shabab – could withdraw their support for the Somali government.
Kenya has over the years used local clans who straddle territories between the two countries to intervene when rebels tried to cross the border . – Sapa-AP