Sunday, February 22, 2009

Pakistani kidnapped in Somalia; AU base attacked

Gunmen kidnapped a Pakistani agricultural expert in northern Somalia, officials said Sunday, and Islamic insurgents claimed to have carried out a suicide attack on an African Union peacekeeping base in the capital.

The Pakistani man was seized from his car 20 miles (30 kilometers) south of the port of Bossaso, said Muse Gelle, governor of the Bari region in Somalia's semiautonomous Puntland. He was traveling to a farming project where he was working, Gelle said.

The man's name and employer were not immediately known. The area is notorious for kidnappings and piracy in the Horn of Africa nation.

Separately, insurgents in Somalia's restive capital, Mogadishu, said they attacked an AU peacekeeping base there with a suicide attack.

"Our fighters have carried out two suicide attacks on the infidels in Mogadishu, inflicting heavy losses," said al-Shabab spokesman Sheik Muktar Robow.

But peacekeeping spokesman Bahoku Barigye denied the report, saying it was just a mortar attack.

There was no immediate word on casualties.

Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991.

The AU peacekeeping force in Mogadishu has a restricted mandate to guard key government installations in the two years it has been here. It has not been involved in fighting Islamic militants in the capital, battles that have killed thousands of civilians over the past two years. But hardline groups still view the peacekeepers as an occupying force.

Al-Shabab, an extremist Islamic group, has threatened to focus its attacks on AU troops now that Ethiopian troops, who had been on a two-year deployment, have left Mogadishu.

The U.S. State Department considers al-Shabab a terrorist organization linked to al-Qaida, something the group has denied.

Somalia's government controls virtually no territory in this unstable nation.

A former soldier, rebel and warlord named Abdullahi Yusuf resigned as president in December after failing to pacify the country during his four-years as president.

A moderate Islamist leader, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, was elected by parliament and observers hope he will bring many of Somalia's Islamic factions into a more inclusive government.

Ahmed was chairman of the Islamic Courts Union that ran Mogadishu for six months in 2006 before Ethiopian soldiers drove them from power.

Source: AP.

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