June 30, 2016 | Morning Headlines
More Than 20 Killed In Central Somalia Fighting
29 June – Source: Voice of America – 311 Words
More than 20 people were killed Wednesday in fighting between government soldiers and Islamist insurgents in central Somalia, witnesses and officials said. Al-Shabaab fighters attacked a Somali National Army base in El-Hareri, a village in the Galguduud region, before dawn. The commander of the base, Colonel Ahmed Mohamed, told VOA’s Somali service that 18 militants, five government soldiers and a civilian were killed during the fighting.
“They attacked our base with hundreds of heavily armed fighters and 10 battle wagons mounted with machine guns,” he said. “We managed to repulse the attack, and our troops then counterattacked.” Each side lost a vehicle in the clash, he said. Abulle Idow, a resident contacted via telephone, said locals went to the base after the fighting and saw more than 20 dead bodies.
More than 10 militants and two government soldiers were injured in the attack, government officials said. Radio Andalus, Al-Shabaab’s mouthpiece in Somalia, reported that the militants had initially seized control of the base and killed more a dozen government soldiers, but Mohamed denied that.
Key Headlines
- More Than 20 Killed In Central Somalia Fighting (Voice of America)
- Elders Say Somaliland Is Fuelling The Fighting In Sool Region (Goobjoog News)
- Sheikh Bashir Opposes Sections Of The Gender Law Calls It A Violation To The Sharia Law (Hiiraan Online)
- Landmine Explosion Kills A Government Soldier In Mogadishu (Goobjoog News)
- Al-Shabaab Plans To Attack US Forces Prompted Recent Airstrike In Somalia (The Hill)
- 4 Extremists Killed Averting An Attack (Associated Press)
- The Age Of Disintegration (Middle East Online)
NATIONAL MEDIA
Elders Say Somaliland Is Fuelling The Fighting In Sool Region
29 June – Source: Goobjoog News – 188 Words
Days after clan militia skirmishes in Sah-Dher locality, elders in Sool region are now accusing the administration of the breakaway Somaliland to be fuelling the fighting in the area. Garad Jama’a Garad Ali says Sool has nto gone back into the dark days when Sah-Dher locality was the epicenter of clashes between rival warlords. He accused Somaliland of arming rival clan militias to sustain their presence in the area.
“The Somaliland Administration is playing a mature role to fuel these conflicts, their strategy is to create hostility and divisions between the clans,” he said. “The locality was stable and people were living side by side peacefully before,” he added. At least 12 people have been killed in a deadly clan-related violence in the region for last two weeks. The clash between the two rival clans had started this year following a land dispute, while the local elders been able to mediate between the groups, a lasting ceasefire has never been achieved. Other sources claim that the violence is about elective politics, with each clan wanting a dominant role.
Sheikh Bashir Opposes Sections Of The Gender Law, Calls It A Violation To The Sharia Law
29 June – Source: Hiiraan Online – 278 Words
The Somali Religious Council opposes the recently enacted law governing the national policy on gender. The council said they have noted many sections of the article that are not in line with Islamic Sharia. The government had ascented the contentious sections of the article into law last month.
“When we read the gender law, we saw many articles that are not within the provision of the Islamic law. Notable among them is the law that states one has to be 18 years to be considered an adult and allowed to get married which is contrary to the Islamic Sharia.” the Chairman of the Somali Religious Council, Sheikh Bashir Ahmed Salaad told a press conference held in Mogadishu on Tuesday.
He also took issue with the passed law that gives he believes gives excess rights to women. “It is a recipe for rebellion against their parents and husbands; a situation that is likely to weaken the Muslim society.” Sheikh Bashir also pointed out that there was need to reject a section of the law that prohibits circumcision of women and thus criminalising the act. The law states that any parent committing the act of circumcision to their daughter will be liable to a jail term.
The cleric was also opposed to the law that states that a woman can get married without her parents consent. He also took issue with the proposed law that allows Sheikhs to marry couples without their parents approval. He said such practices do not exist anywhere in the world. Sheikh Bashir called for support towards women in their house work, education and health but advised them to distance themselves from politics.
Landmine Explosion Kills A Government Soldier In Mogadishu
29 June – Source: Goobjoog News – 165 Words
At least one soldier was killed and three others injured after their vehicle was hit by a landmine in Mogadishu. Residents in Mogadishu’s industrial area say the landmine was planted there and went off immediately after the military vehicle stepped on the landmine. SNA officer who declined to mention his name said those injured had been rushed to the hospital. “Their vehicle ran over a landmine that we suspect had been planted there, killing a soldier and wounded three others as they were patrolling the area,” he said.
A witness said one soldier was killed in the explosion. “I saw one body. three others were bleeding badly,” a local resident Mohamed told Goobjoog News. He said Somali government troops sealed off the site of the explosion and started operation to pursue the perpetrators. No group or individual has claimed responsibility for the attack. However, officials are blaming Al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab is al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Somalia, fighting to overthrow the country’s internationally recognized government.
INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
Al-Shabaab Plans To Attack US Forces Prompted Recent Airstrike In Somalia
29 June – Source: The Hill – 733 Words
Al Qaeda militants in Somalia planned and prepared “imminent attacks” against U.S. forces there, according to a recent statement from U.S. Africa Command. The plans prompted a U.S. airstrike just last week against the militants in Somalia, according to the little-noticed Africom statement. “On June 21, 2016 in southern Somalia U.S. forces conducted a self-defense strike against Al-Shabaab, killing three,” said a June 23 Africom statement. “The operation was conducted after it was assessed the terrorists were planning and preparing to conduct an imminent attack against U.S. forces,” it said.
There are about 50 U.S. forces on the ground in Somalia, in support of partner forces fighting Al-Shabaab militants. The strike comes amid a new assessment by IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre that said over the course of 2015 and 2016, Al-Shabaab has “been expanding capabilities and increasing the tempo of attacks.”
Al-Shabaab militants recently underscored that threat by storming a hotel in Mogadishu on Saturday, taking guests hostage and killing at least 14. The terrorist group has also claimed responsibility for another attack at another hotel in the capital in early June that killed at least 15 people. The U.S. has been conducting a steady stream of airstrikes against Al-Shabaab over the past several months.
In May, U.S. forces conducted five airstrikes against the terrorist group. One strike was conducted on May 27against Abdullahi Haji Da’ud, a senior military commander for Al-Shabaab. Another airstrike was conducted onMay 13 in southern Somalia against nine Al-Shabaab forces, after it was assessed that they were “planning and preparing to conduct an imminent attack against U.S. forces,” Africom said. “Other similar actions were undertaken on three other occasions in May, including one on May 9 and two on May 12,” Africom said in a June 17 statement.
4 Extremists Killed Averting An Attack
29 June – Source: Associated Press – 115 Words
A Kenyan military official says soldiers killed four Islamic extremists from Somalia’s Al-Shabaa rebels suspected to have been planning an attack on the coastal county of Lamu. Military spokesman Col. David Obonyo said Wednesday that Kenyan troops killed the fighters after pursuing them overnight. Obonyo said the extremists launched an exploratory attack on an army base Tuesday.
He said a Kenyan soldier was wounded in the gunfight. Obonyo said a cache of weapons was recovered including an improvised bomb. Somali based Al-Shabaab militants have killed hundreds of Kenyans since Oct. 2011, when Kenyan troops were deployed to Somalia to fight the rebels. Last week Al-Shabaab killed five police officers in Mandera County in Kenya’s north.
OPINION, ANALYSIS, AND CULTURE
“If you’re looking for the causes of state failure in our time, the place to start is undoubtedly with the end of the Cold War a quarter-century ago. Once it was over, neither the U.S. nor the new Russia that emerged from the Soviet Union’s implosion had a significant interest in continuing to prop up “failed states,” as each had for so long, fearing that the rival superpower and its local proxies would otherwise take over.”
The Age Of Disintegration
29 June – Source: Middle East Online – 2,673 Words
We live in an age of disintegration. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Across the vast swath of territory between Pakistan and Nigeria, there are at least seven ongoing wars — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and South Sudan. These conflicts are extraordinarily destructive.
They are tearing apart the countries in which they are taking place in ways that make it doubtful they will ever recover. Cities like Aleppo in Syria, Ramadi in Iraq, Taiz in Yemen, and Benghazi in Libya have been partly or entirely reduced to ruins. There are also at least three other serious insurgencies: in southeast Turkey, where Kurdish guerrillas are fighting the Turkish army, in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula where a little-reported but ferocious guerrilla conflict is underway, and in northeast Nigeria and neighboring countries where Boko Haram continues to launch murderous attacks.
All of these have a number of things in common: they are endless and seem never to produce definitive winners or losers. (Afghanistan has effectively been at war since 1979, Somalia since 1991.) They involve the destruction or dismemberment of unified nations, their de facto partition amid mass population movements and upheavals — well publicized in the case of Syria and Iraq, less so in places like South Sudan where more than 2.4 million people have been displaced in recent years.
Add in one more similarity, no less crucial for being obvious: in most of these countries, where Islam is the dominant religion, extreme Salafi-Jihadi movements, including the Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda, and the Taliban are essentially the only available vehicles for protest and rebellion. By now, they have completely replaced the socialist and nationalist movements that predominated in the twentieth century; these years have, that is, seen a remarkable reversion to religious, ethnic, and tribal identity, to movements that seek to establish their own exclusive territory by the persecution and expulsion of minorities.