NAIROBI , Kenya, October 5, 2006 – Resting a hand on one of two Belgian-made pistols stuffed into his waistband, Aden Hashi Ayro, the military commander of the Islamic movement that is advancing across Somalia, fits the part of a radical revolutionary perfectly.

Increasingly, as his forces seize town after town in southern Somalia, the once reclusive Ayro is taking a public role. His emergence is a signal that radicals within the movement are gaining the strength to put their anti-Western, anti-modern stamp on Somalia.

Ayro, who is his mid-30s and allegedly received al-Qaida training in Afghanistan, has been linked by U.N. officials to the murders of 16 people, including BBC journalist Kate Peyton. Counterterrorism officials also believe he was involved in plotting to blow an Ethiopian airliner out of the sky.

He has never been photographed and until recently was rarely seen in public. He stepped from the shadows last week in Kismayo, Somalia, to address hundreds of his fanatical gunmen who had just seized the strategic seaport without firing a shot.

Since June, Islamic forces have captured almost all of southern Somalia's strategic and economic centers, making them the de facto authority in the shattered African nation and sidelining the country's virtually powerless official government.

The fighters are under a loose alliance of Islamic courts, some more radical in their interpretation of Quranic law than others. With the courts has come a semblance of order after 15 years of chaos and civil war, but the strict and often severe interpretation of Islam espoused by some in the movement raises memories of Afghanistan's Taliban. They have brought public floggings and executions of criminals to Mogadishu, the Somali capital.

Western governments say it is too early to tell if the moderates within the Islamic council or hard-liners like Ayro will emerge on top.

"There is an ostrich-like sense of denial here," U.S.-based counterterrorism expert Peter Pham said, adding that the moderates cannot compete because the hard-liners control the guns. "What we have here is a dangerously radical movement."

Ayro is potentially the most dangerous of them all, Pham said.

Sporting a neatly trimmed goatee and a green-and-white turban, Ayro is the courts' go-between with al-Qaida, according to Pham, who argues the terrorist group is looking to take advantage of Somalia's strategic location in Africa, bordering the Middle East.

He has a much clearer link to international terror than the Islamic group's leader, Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, Pham said.

The U.S. government accuses Aweys, nicknamed the Old Fox, of links to al-Qaida. But analysts also say he's the only one who can avoid a disastrous war because he has enough military might to persuade more hardline elements, like Ayro, to accept a power-sharing deal with Somalia's cornered government.

Ayro's 3,000 radical cadres known as Al-Shabaab, or "The Youth," appear to be spoiling for a fight. U.N. reports indicate that 200 anti-aircraft missiles were shipped into Somalia in March for the Islamic group despite an arms embargo.

Foreign Muslim fighters _ reportedly from Chechnya, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Eritrea _ have joined the fray and large military training camps are opening in areas under Ayro's control. During an appearance in Kismayo, Ayro was the first official in the movement to acknowledge the long-rumored presence of foreign fighters.

Dahir Rayale Kahin, president of Somaliland, which declared its independence from Somalia in 1991, told the AP the region is witnessing a radicalization of the moderate, Sufi-inspired Islam that has dominated Somali culture for centuries. Officials in Somaliland have carved out a peaceful enclave, and are close and critical observers of the chaos nearby.

Kahin says this "fanatical slant" is inspired by the strict Wahhabi school of Islam from Saudi Arabia, whose teachings motivated al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.

Fanaticism may have been behind the Sept. 17 assassination of an Italian nun, a longtime medical worker in Somalia who was shot dead in Mogadishu. Those arrested at the scene by the Islamic movement have since been released, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

A day later, Somalia saw its first car-bombing, a failed attempt on the president of the weak transitional government. The government blames both attacks on Islamic radicals.

With or without the specter of Islamic extremism, the Horn of Africa is already a tinderbox. Tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea are still simmering over an unresolved border conflict and have spilled over into Somalia. Ethiopia, with almost half of its 77 million population Muslim, is fearful of a neighboring fundamentalist state.

"I am afraid we are sliding toward a regional conflict with states lining up on different sides of the divide," Kenyan-based regional analyst Matt Bryden said.

Pham says without immediate international diplomacy, the radicals' takeover of Somalia could prove as costly as the failure to deal with the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan.

"Failure to invest a small amount in stability and security in this country will reap a devastating cost later," Pham said. "That is the lesson we have all learned from 9-11."

Associated Press writer Tom Maliti in Hargeysa, Somalia contributed to this report.

Source: The Associated Press