NAIROBI, Kenya -- Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, once depicted as the dangerous leader of "Africa's Taliban," has emerged from Somalia's violent chaos as a moderate figure to claim the war-torn country's presidency.
The young cleric was elected by parliament during a session in Djibouti on Saturday and succeeds Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, who resigned from the helm of the transitional administration last month after a bitter power struggle.
When his Islamic Courts Union (ICU) took power in 2006 and imposed a strict form of Sharia in Mogadishu and other towns, Sheikh Sharif, in his forties, became the man to bring down.
Ethiopia -- the previous United States administration's strongest regional ally -- invaded Somalia later that year with a mandate to topple Sheikh Sharif's ICU and prop up the embattled transitional federal government (TFG).
He was forced into exile with much of the ICU's political leadership and, in Asmara, founded the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS), an Islamist-dominated opposition umbrella group.
Meanwhile the ICU's former armed wing, the Al Qaeda-linked Shebab, waged a brutal guerrilla war against Ethiopian troops, in fighting that left thousands of civilians dead and displaced hundreds of thousands of others.
Sheikh Sharif has since joined the United Nations-sponsored reconciliation process with the TFG, setting the stage for an Ethiopian withdrawal that was completed in January this year.
"He probably never was the big bad wolf that the international community made him out to be," said Stig Jarle Hansen, a Nairobi-based researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research and an expert on Somalia.
"He made unfortunate alliances with radicals who later turned into the Shebab but I think he always represented the political center and has a reputation for integrity that few Somali leaders have," he added.
Sheikh Sharif is from the town of Jowhar and belongs to the Abgaal branch of the Hawiye clan, which is one of the country's two largest and prominent in central Somalia and Mogadishu.
He studied in Libya and Sudan and became a geography teacher.
The abduction of one of his young pupils in 2002 is believed to be what prompted him to take action against the warlords who had ruled the country for years.
Sheikh Sharif set up an Islamic court in his CC area of Mogadishu which made him a hero with the local population by re-establishing some form of justice in the war-ravaged capital.
The CC court was considered one of the most moderate of the ICU's Sharia tribunals but Sheikh Sharif definitively fell out with the international community when he called for jihad (holy war) against the Ethiopian invader.
Last November, he returned to his stronghold of Jowhar, located some 90 kilometers (55 miles) north of Mogadishu, for the first time in two years and after Ethiopian troops pulled out of the town.
He was given a hero's welcome but the reality on the ground soon restrained any plans for a swift return of military influence and his ARS-Djibouti security forces are believed to be in the hundreds, not the thousands.
Some of his commanders in the ICU have made a habit of violating his ceasefires and some of his forces have also implemented very harsh forms of Sharia justice.
With many parts of southern Somalia firmly under hardline Islamist control, observers say his ability to prove himself as a president will hinge largely on whether or not he can stabilize the country's central regions.
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