About 100 people chanting "God is great!" and "No to foreign troops!" rallied at the protest organized by religious leaders in Baidoa, the base of the government whose authority has been dented by the Islamists' rise this year.

Nobody was hurt and the crowd quickly dispersed.

The African Union on Wednesday endorsed a plan to send peacekeepers into Somalia but said first it would need help from the European Union and others to raise the estimated $335-million cost.

The Islamists, who took a swathe of southern Somalia earlier this year, have threatened to take up arms if necessary to stop the arrival of foreign troops, which they say is an Ethiopian-inspired plot to control Somalia.

President Abdillahi Yusuf's weak but Western-backed interim government wants the peacekeepers in to bolster its bid to re-establish central rule in the Horn of Africa nation for the first time in 15 years since warlords ousted a dictator.

In Baidoa, provincial commissioner Mahamud Mohamed Barbar said the government stopped Friday's demonstration for security reasons. Organizers had links with the Mogadishu-based Islamists, he said.

"We will not allow such a protest to take place again," he said at the scene.

Demonstrator Mohamed Abdi said there was strong opposition to the AU plan.

"We don't want foreign troops to be deployed in our country," he said. "That is why we are demonstrating."

The Islamists and their supporters say Somalis should be left to sort out their own problems, without foreign intervention.

And al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden recently weighed into the controversy by saying the arrival of foreign troops in Somalia would justify jihad.

The last foreign intervention in Somalia, a US-led UN peacekeeping mission, ended in disaster in the early 1990s, as illustrated in the Hollywood film Black Hawk Down.

Source: Reuters

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