Shari'a terrorist hit theaters in Somalia

Times:

When Ibrahim Saeed Abdullah saw a neighbour’s cinema burnt down by a barrage of grenades, he realised that he had no choice but to heed the death threats he had received from the big men with guns in their hands and hatred in their hearts. Last week he closed the doors of his own cinema for the last time.

It was two years since Abdullah had opened for business in Mogadishu, the largely ruined capital of war-torn Somalia. The location may have been inauspicious but the timing seemed right: the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamist coalition that briefly took over much of the country in 2006, had just been driven out by an American-backed Ethiopian invasion.

In recent months, however, Al-Shabab, the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union, has spread renewed fear through Mogadishu, a city of up to 3m people that has been convulsed by fighting for 17 years.

Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Al-Shabab does not approve of the showing of films.

Soon Abdullah’s cinema was the last one standing in Mogadishu and he was threatened repeatedly. “They came with weapons, surrounded my cinema and told me, ‘We will kill you if you don’t close’,” he said.

Al-Shabab, now an autonomous rebel group which has added an explosive element to the combustible mix of Mogadishu’s militias, enforces strict sharia (Islamic law) and uses tactics imported from the global jihadi movement. As in Afghanistan, those who work or trade with the government risk being branded as spies or collaborators and beheaded as a warning to others.

Members of Al-Shabab deliver “night letters” to businessmen and others they wish to intimidate. One such letter listed “traitors assisting the occupiers who attacked the country” and warned of action if they did not make amends in 48 hours.

The group has overrun at least eight towns this year and taken control of large swathes of Mogadishu. It is behind a spate of roadside bombings directed at convoys of Ethiopian troops.

Journalists are routinely harassed. Editors and broadcasters received a letter from Al-Shabab last week instructing them to stop referring to the government and to say “puppets” instead. They were told to call dead insurgents “martyrs”.

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Most of Al-Shabab’s senior members were bodyguards to foreign Al-Qaeda operatives in Somalia during the 1990s and display a powerful streak of antiAmericanism.

Aden Hashi Ayro, one of its leaders, was killed with 24 others in a predawn US airstrike on his home in Dhusa Mareb, several hundred miles north of the capital earlier this month. Ayro, Al-Shabab’s military commander who was trained in Afghanistan, had been blamed for the deaths of at least 10 foreigners, including Kate Peyton, a BBC news producer, who was killed outside her hotel in Mogadishu in 2005.

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Dialog with the thugs seems to be the Brit answer. I prefer the predawn "airstrikes." I think it was really a cruise missile. The Islamic terrorist of Somalia are irredeemable. We must continue to seek their destruction.