Islamist advance seen to threaten a wider conflict

By John Donnelly

WASHINGTON, September 28, 2006-- Africa specialists criticized the Bush administration yesterday for not paying more attention to the increasingly volatile situation in Somalia, saying that senior officials were consumed by their efforts to stop the fighting in the Darfur region of Sudan.

In Somalia, Islamist militias have taken one town after another in the south-central part of the fractured nation since capturing the de facto capital Mogadishu in June. Now, they appear poised to attack the small town of Baidoa near the country's western border with Ethiopia.

Baidoa is the base of the increasingly powerless Somali transitional federal government, which is backed by the United States and Ethiopia. Analysts predict that if the Islamists attack the town, which appears likely, the conflict could evolve into a wider war with Ethiopia.

“We're completely distracted by Sudan," said J. Stephen Morrison , director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic & International Studies and a State Department official during the Clinton administration. ``We should be engaging the Islamists . . . and find out what their intentions are."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday delivered a major speech on Sudan before the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa , calling on the government in Khartoum to end hostilities immediately and unconditionally accept a UN peacekeeping force. The fighting in Darfur has led to the deaths of several hundred thousand people and displacing an estimated 2.5 million people since 2002.

Rice talked about Somalia only in response to a question from Melvin P. Foote , president of Constituency for Africa , a Washington-based advocacy group, who asked what the administration was doing about problems in nearby Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.

On Somalia, Rice said, ``We have been trying, despite the difficulties there, to support a transitional government that might be able to . . . help the country come together." She said the United States would not negotiate with any group that works with terrorists, a veiled reference to the Islamists who form the Consultative Council of Islamic Courts, the formal name of the extremist militia that is rapidly consolidating its grip on the country.

Somalia's interim Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Ghedi earlier this week appealed for outside help, saying it was needed to ``protect the region from the expansion of this Al Qaeda network, these terrorists."

It is unclear whether Al Qaeda has recently made serious inroads in Somalia. CIA officials had been traveling extensively to Somalia before June under the protection of warlords, to whom the intelligence officers paid tens of thousands of dollars for information. The warlords are generally rivals of the Islamists. The CIA has been seeking three men in Somalia believed to have organized or participated in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Source: Boston Globe

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