http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2509558,00.html<snip>The US believes that the council is harbouring the al-Qaeda cell that bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and a Kenyan beach resort used by Israeli tourists in 2002. The Bush Administration backed the warlords in their losing battle against the Islamists last spring, and now tacitly backs Ethiopia, an increasingly repressive state that fears that the council’s success in Somalia would foment trouble among its own rapidly growing Muslim population.
“The SICC is now controlled by al-Qaeda cell individuals,” Jendayi Frazer, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, declared last week, calling the council’s leaders “extremist to the core”.
The problem with the US approach is that it ignores the will of the Somali people. Most Somalis approve of the council because it restored peace and security to their country. And they detest the official Government because it includes many of the war lords who were banished in June, including President Yusuf, widely regarded as the original Somali warlord and an Ethiopian stooge.
The official Government — the product of the international community’s 14th attempt since 1991 to restore order to Somalia — was cobbled together in 2004 after two years of tortuous negotiations in Kenya between rival Somali factions. Unwilling to return to war-torn Mogadishu, the Government moved to Baidoa, where it was overtaken by events on the ground, and now sits impotent, crippled by mass desertions and sustained only by the forces of Somalia’s blood enemy.