NAIROBI, Kenya, October 12, 2006 (AP) - The shadowy military commander of the Islamic movement that is advancing across southern Somalia has begun to go public, and is arousing concern among diplomats and counterterrorism experts who allege he is an extremist with links to al-Qaida.

As the rebels seize town after town, Aden Hashi Ayro is increasingly taking a public role, and it may be a signal that radicals within the country's Islamic movement are gaining the strength to put their anti-Western, anti-modern stamp on Somalia.

Ayro, who is in his mid-30s, is said to have received al-Qaida training in Afghanistan. He 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 a plot - never carried out - to bring down an Ethiopian airliner.

He has never been photographed and only last month did he step from the shadows in Kismayo, Somalia, to address hundreds of his gunmen who had just seized the strategic seaport without firing a shot. An Associated Press reporter who was in the crowd of spectators described him as goateed and turbaned, with two Belgian-made pistols stuffed into his waistband.

In Kismayo, Ayro became the first official in the movement to acknowledge a long-rumored connection with foreign fighters, saying: "Among our militia will be Somalis and foreigners." Journalists covering his speech said he had bodyguards who looked Arab, and were told others were from different African countries and from Central Asia.

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.

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 also a strict and often severe interpretation of Islam. They have brought public floggings and executions of criminals to Mogadishu, the capital.

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

U.S.-based counterterrorism expert Peter Pham said moderates cannot compete because the hard-liners control the guns. "What we have here is a dangerously radical movement," he says, and accuses the West of being in "an ostrich-like sense of denial."

Ayro is the courts' link man to al-Qaida, according to Pham, diplomats in the region, and U.N. investigators.

Ayro's boss, Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, nicknamed the Old Fox, also is of concern. The U.S. government accuses him of also having links to al-Qaida. But analysts and diplomats say he's the only one with enough military might to make radicals like Ayro share power with Somalia's cornered government.

Mogadishu residents, afraid to give their names for fear of reprisal, have said al-Qaida suspects operate from a camp established in an old Italian cemetery in the capital. The camp, along with a mosque and a clinic, went up after Ayro's men in January 2005 dug up more than 700 bodies that had been buried there between 1908 and 1941, when Somalia was an Italian colony. They dumped the bones at the airport.

At a London inquest in 2005 into the murder of a British couple in Somaliland, British police detective Jill Bailey testified Ayro was likely linked to al-Qaida. She said a plan to blow up an Ethiopian airliner and bomb-making manuals were found at a property owned by Ayro. Ayro owned the house where his brother-in-law, Mohammed Ali Essa, was captured, the inquest was told. Essa was one of 15 convicted by a Somaliland court of killing the couple. Essa was among eight - four tried in absentia - sentenced to death; seven were given life sentences. The death sentences have not yet been carried out and Essa is jailed.

Ayro underwent military training in Afghanistan before the U.S. invasion in 2001, according to a report on Somali extremists by the International Crisis Group, an independent think tank that monitors conflicts. The December report said Ayro's "militia has links to al-Qaida operatives in Mogadishu ... to whom it provides protection."

AP Writer Anthony Mitchell covers Somalia from his base in neighboring Kenya.

Source: The Associated Press