The boys’ defiance of the Al-Shabaab order
Despite the warning by the Al-Shabaab militia, the Hiiraan football team chose to travel to Puntland in order to take part in the competition there. In fact, the young boys had to sneak out of town without the knowledge and the permission of the Al-Shabaab. The trainers say they took that decision after a serious deliberation with the boys. According to the coaches, the team could choose to abide the orders of Al-Shabaab for its own safety and remain absent from the football competition, but they say doing so would have disappointed thousands of their supporters in the region which they represent. Absence from the games would have also been a great disappointment for the young football players themselves as they have been looking forward to this event for quite some time.
The Al-Shabaab hate for the football
Al-Shabaab is known to have carried out terror attacks inside and outside Somalia. The feared militia has a history of being at odd with the football game which preoccupies many of the youth of Somalia who are unfortunately deprived of the basic needs of life, like education and employment, due to the protracted civil war in their country. Al-Shabaab’s hostility towards football emanates from the fact that football deprives this notorious organization the supply of young militiamen. The organization seeks to draw the attention of the young men to itself and induce them to join its ranks. One of the tricks applied by it is to prohibit and deprive the youth of all possible sources of entertainment including football, making its violent culture of gun-tooting the only option and the way of life available to the young men. It is not surprising the organization’s choice of its first terror attack outside Somalia in a football arena in Kampala in Uganda. The terrorist organization carried out twin suicide bomb-blasts in a bar in Kampala where many football enthusiastic young people were watching on a big TV-screen the final match of FIFA world cup 2010 in South Africa. While Al-Shabaab claimed the responsibility of carrying out the terror attacks in Kampala in order to revenge on Ugandan government for sending its forces to Mogadishu in Somalia to support the internationally recognized weak and fragile central government there. For the Al-Shabaab, the choice of this soft target was an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, meaning revenging on both the Ugandan government and the football game.
Focus on the game despite the fear
One can imagine the toil and the pressure on their concentration on the matches as a result of the risk of prosecution hanging over their heads and as well as not knowing where to go after the matches are wrapped up in few days. So far, the team has qualified itself to the quart-final, becoming the second team to qualify from Group A after the Puntland team of Nugaal which hosts the tournament. In the past things were the opposite, before the civil war Hiiraan region was the dominant in the game in Central Somalia and all the other teams in its group would have to contend for grabbing the second position. So far, the weak performance in the ongoing competition by the teams from the unstable southern regions testifies how a war ravages a society and reverses its progress, whereas the advancement made by the Puntland teams signifies the dividend of peace and stability. The coaches and the players are grateful to the people of Puntland for their hospitality and for also affording them the opportunity of playing football in a peaceful and harmonic atmosphere. The boys hope to win the tournament and bring the cup home, but the question is: can they return to their home region as long as the threat to their lives labeled against them by Al-Shabaab remains in force?
Al Shabaab repeats its prosecution threat
Meanwhile, the local Al-Shabaab militia leaders who are furious of the players’ defiance of the order which prohibited the team’s participation in the games have repeated and reinforced the threat of prosecuting the players once they return to the region. So far, such a threat still remains in place and there has been no utterance from the senior leaders in the organization revoking that cruel decision. It’s not known why the Al-Shabaab has singled out the Hiiraan Team, while some of the other teams participating in the same tournament are from regions under the control of the militia. Al-Shabaab is believed to have almost no local support in Hiiraan region and has to heavily rely on armed militiamen from the Bay region where one of its senior leaders, Mukhtar Robow, known as Abu Mansur comes from. The organization carried out its first high profile assassination of government member in the same region when it killed in a suicide car-bomb the country’s former security minister Omar Hashi Aden who hailed from the Hiiraan Region whose capital city Belet Wein is just 30KM from the Somalia’s border with Ethiopia. The same attack left behind dozens of others dead and many more injured. The minister was in his home region in order to prepare armed resistance against the Al-Shabaab and evict it from its southern strongholds. Meanwhile the African Union forces AMISOM in Somalia boosts the number of its troops and is planning to expand its operations outside Mogadishu. The region is one of the few places outside Mogadishu where the Al-Shabaab militia faces continuous armed resistance from the local population and is aware of its vulnerability in the same region.
Cry for help
The Football Federation of the impoverished and the war-torn nation is aware of the plight of Hiiraan Team and the risk to their lives by eventual Al-Shabaab prosecution, but it has almost nothing to offer to the young players who have no place to return once the football competition is over. No nation in the world, whether giant or small, ignores today a threat directed to it or to its citizens by Al-Shabaab as this Al-Qaida affiliated organization which some call the African Taliban, is known for making its threats real. It will totally be a fatal mistake to ignore the serious danger faced by these young soccer players. Thus, the foreign embassies and the NGOs accredited to Somalia as well as the international community as a whole have all a moral duty to come to the rescue of the boys who face prosecution by Al-Shabaab even though all they have done is just to love the football game. The players cannot go back to their home where they risk unfair and unjust prosecution. All they need at the moment is a temporary place to stay until their faith is clear and a final solution is found, so they can continue to train in peace and prepare for next tournament.
Hiiraan Diaspora in North America
E-mail: HiiraanDiaspora@gmail.com
Source: Hiiraan Online
No comments:
Post a Comment