Seven people accused of renouncing Islam and spying for the Government were beheaded in Somalia yesterday in a move that underlined the growing authority of the country’s Islamist insurgents.
The extremist al-Shabaab group is battling the interim Government in Mogadishu and has implemented a strict interpretation of Sharia in the parts of the country that it controls.
“Al-Shabaab told us that they were beheaded for being Christian followers and spies,” a relative said after the killings. A witness described seeing the decapitated bodies in the back of a lorry in the town of Baidoa.
The killings were the largest number to take place at one time. They were the latest in a series of beheadings, amputations and stonings to death ordered by al-Shabaab, which is accused of having links to al-Qaeda and is listed as a terrorist organisation by the US.
In areas that al-Shabaab controls, including most of southern Somalia and much of Mogadishu, numerous others accused of collaborating with the Government or committing crimes such as adultery, rape, theft or murder have been publicly executed, flogged or had amputations ordered in recent weeks.
“This is a worrying new development,” Roger Middleton, a Somalia analyst at Chatham House, the British foreign policy think-tank, said. “It shows that al-Shabaab is willing to use these kind of extreme punishments and that the Government has no ability to influence events on the ground in places where it has no military presence.”
President Sharif Ahmed’s Transitional Federal Government is protected by 4,300 African Union peacekeepers, backed by the United Nations and propped up by Western governments, which arm and train its forces. Its authority extends to only a small area of the capital and the roads to the port and airport.
Last month four teenagers who were accused of theft each had a hand and a foot amputated in Mogadishu and in the southern town of Wanlaweyn a married man accused of rape and murder was buried up to his neck in sand and stoned to death by ten masked men.
In October last year a 13-year-old victim of gang rape was convicted of adultery in a Sharia court and stoned to death in the town of Kismayo, controlled by al-Shabaab, near the Kenyan border. The brutality of this informal justice has outraged human rights activists.
Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that the Islamist insurgents and government forces might be committing war crimes in renewed fighting that has killed hundreds and forced more than 200,000 civilians to flee Mogadishu since May.
“Fighters from both sides are reported to have used torture and fired mortar shells indiscriminately into areas populated or frequented by civilians. Some of these acts might amount to war crimes,” Ms Pillay said.
In moves reminiscent of the Taleban, which in 2001 destroyed two statues of Buddha, the Somali hardliners have desecrated the tombs of saints worshipped by Sufis, a mystical branch of Islam despised by the extremists but widespread among ordinary Somalis.
They have forced women to wear veils, banned dances and other events at which men and women mix and outlawed the chewing of khat, a popular drug.
Analysts said that an influx of hundreds of foreign jihadis from Britain, Pakistan and elsewhere has further radicalised al-Shabaab and transformed it into a more effective guerrilla force.
With the help of foreign fighters al-Shabaab began a fresh offensive in May, carrying out at least one suicide attack, in which a senior minister was killed in Beledweyne, near Ethiopia.
Despite a UN arms embargo imposed more than 16 years ago, the Islamists remain well supplied. Last month the African Union called for sanctions on Eritrea for arming al-Shabaab, which Eritrea denies.
Living in fear
— Somalia has been embroiled in civil war, lacking a functioning central government, for 18 years
— 18,000 civilians have been killed in the conflict since the start of 2006
— 1.2 million people are displaced within Somalia and more than 200,000 have fled to Kenya
— Less than 1 per cent of Somalia’s population is Christian, with the rest Sunni Muslim. Most Christians belong to the Roman Catholic Church or Church of the Nazarene
— Somali Christians keep a low profile, mostly worshipping in house churches, but have been the target of mob attacks and kidnappings
— A Somalian who had moved to Britain was shot dead in his home country in April last year; Daud Hassan Ali’s widow said that it was because he had converted to Christianity
— Christian pressure groups say that five Christians were killed for their religion last year
Source: Times database
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