MOGADISHU, Somalia – — A radical Islamic group in Somalia has threatened to seize weapons and ammunition the U.S. has supplied to the nation’s embattled government.
But Uganda, a key U.S. ally in the region, praised the arms shipment.
Both were responding to an announcement by U.S. officials last week that the Obama administration had supplied arms and provided military training worth just less than $10 million to the east African country’s shaky official government.
The Obama’s administration’s goal is to provide the faltering Somali government with weapons and to help armies in several neighboring African nations train Somali forces. But experts have expressed concern that the arms may end up diverted to insurgent groups.
Sheik Hassan Ya’qub, a spokesman for the militant group al-Shabab in the port town of Kismayo, said recently: “The weapons sent to the so-called government will only escalate violence in Somalia and we, the holy warriors, believe that we will eventually seize them.”
Washington considers al-Shabab a terrorist group with links to Al Qaeda, which al-Shabab denies. The group, which controls much of southern Somalia, is trying to drive out the government and install a strict form of Islam.
“I welcome [the] USA’s sending of weapons to Somalia,” said Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda, a major contributor of troops to the African Union force in the Somali capital.
The African Union and the UN “support Somalia’s government, and if the U.S. comes out to support it, it is a good gesture,” Museveni told reporters Monday in the Ugandan port town of Entebbe.
Over the past two months, Somali President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed’s government has come under heavy attacks from Islamic insurgents pounding government positions with mortars and targeting senior officials in suicide attacks. During an intense two-week period of fighting in the capital in May, about 200 civilians were killed.
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Source: Chicago Tribune
