Daily News Channel
Abayte Ahmed and her husband learned of their son’s death in the most heinous fashion. A family acquaintance called and told them to click on an Internet site. There on the screen were photographs of their 20-year-old son — the boy with the movie-star looks — shot through the head thousands of miles away in Somalia.
Amid the worsening conflict in his country, Somalia’s president made a plea for Somalis living in the United States to stop sending their young men to fight.
Somalia’s transitional government has the right to request military help from its neighbors against armed militants, the African Union said Monday, but Kenya was quick to reject the idea of sending troops and suggested the AU should spearhead such a move. Somali parliament speaker Sheikh Adan Madowe on Saturday called on Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Yemen to send in their military forces to help government troops stop hardline Islamist militants from taking over. “Militants are wrestling the power from the government and so we call for military help from neighboring countries,” the speaker said at a news conference in Mogadishu.
Somalia’s internal security minister was killed Thursday in a massive suicide car bombing in central Somalia, the country’s president said.
The Colombian military has captured one of the top leaders for a Marxist rebel group waging war on the government for more than 40 years, authorities said. The officials believe that al Qaeda may see the Horn of Africa as its new headquarters after dozens of attacks from U.S. drones along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border
Al Qaeda operatives are leaving the battle zones along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and heading for Somalia and Yemen, where they have set up training camps, according to U.S.
Described as the largest single gathering of displaced residents in the world today, tens of thousands of civilians are seeking shelter along the Afgooye corridor outside Mogadishu, according to the United Nations. Fighting between government forces and Islamist militias has triggered the flight of more than 67,000 Somalis in and around Mogadishu since May 8, the U.N
Somalia needs international help to fight Islamist extremists battling for power in the lawless Horn of Africa nation, the country’s moderate Islamist president said Monday.
Just last month, Western donors gathered in Brussels to pledge money to the new Somali government of Sheik Sharif Ahmed, in the hope that he could restore order and put an end to the offshore piracy that has plagued shipping off his country’s coastline. But renewed fighting in and around Mogadishu has raised fears that Somalia’s 15th government in 18 years is about to fail.
Ethiopian forces returned to Somalia on Tuesday, seizing control of a Somali border town, a local journalist told CNN.