LONDON/ UNITED NATIONS (Al Arabiya, Agencies)
Al-Qaeda is using Somalia to train, regroup and plan further attacks, the Somali prime minister said Wednesday, warning it was also beginning to threaten regional stability.
"Somalia has now clearly become a haven for the pariah that is al-Qaeda," Omar Abdirashid Sharmarke said in a speech in London.
"We cannot be certain of the precise size of their presence in our country but al-Qaeda are here, they are training and planning in our land. Somalia is serving as an ideal place for them to re-group and redeploy."
" We cannot be certain of the precise size of their presence in our country but al-Qaeda are here, they are training and planning in our land. Somalia is serving as an ideal place for them to re-group and redeploy " Somali PM Omar Abdirashid Sharmarke The al-Qaeda inspired-Shabaab group and allied hard-line Islamists control large swathes of southern and central Somalia, and Sharmarke said defeating them was important not only to his country but "to the whole world".
He said the insurgency was also spreading to other countries and "al Shabab is now starting to threaten regional stability".
"And Somalia does risk being taken over by al-Qaeda, just as Afghanistan was the haven of al-Qaeda in the 1990s," he told the Royal Institute of International Affairs think-tank at Chatham House in London.
Sharmarke said that an exclusively military response would not work, saying strong government and regeneration was needed to provide an alternative.
"An insurgency needs chaos, discontent and poverty and we must take that away," he said.
Sharmarke is part of a Western-backed transitional government headed by President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed that took over earlier this year, but has faced a renewed campaign by the hard-line Islamist Shebab. |
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UN says more money needed " I would guess that we would be asking for more money and more assistance in the months ahead. Clearly they are going to need it both for security and also for the social services that the government needs to provide " U.N. political chief Lynn Pascoe On Tuesday the United Nations said Somalia's embattled government is making slow progress towards restoring security and public services, but the country remains fragile and will need more aid money in the coming months,
Without significant development aid it would be very hard for the east African nation's interim government to continue trying to end 18 years of lawlessness and improve the lives of its people, said U.N. political chief Lynn Pascoe.
International donors agreed in April to provide almost $214 million to Somalia and while Pascoe said there were two outstanding pledges that he hoped would be received shortly, more money would be needed.
"I would guess that we would be asking for more money and more assistance in the months ahead. Clearly they are going to need it both for security and also for the social services that the government needs to provide," Pascoe told reporters.
Fighting between the government and Islamist rebel groups has killed 19,000 civilians since the start of 2007 and driven another 1.7 million from their homes. Diplomats say the lawlessness on land is a major cause of Somali piracy.
An African Union AMISOM peacekeeping mission in Somalia is slowly being bolstered. It is currently made up of about 5,200 troops and will eventually increase to 8,000, Pascoe said. |
