Somali Islamists send delegation to peace talks

Witnesses said the 17-strong Islamist team, including Sheikh Mukhtar Ali Robow, deputy security chief, boarded a plane at Mogadishu International Airport sent by the Arab League, who are spearheading the Khartoum talks scheduled for Saturday.

The Islamist team is led by Ibrahim Hussein Adow, who is in charge of foreign relations and is already in Khartoum.

The Islamists seized Mogadishu from U.S.-backed warlords in June, becoming a potent threat to an interim government racked by months of infighting and too weak to move from its temporary seat in the southern town of Baidoa.

Parliament speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan is heading the interim government delegation, which arrived in Khartoum earlier this week. Government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari complained the Islamists had sent a low-level team that cannot take decisions.
"The government really wanted them to send a strong delegation," he told Reuters, "We have always been committed to the talks and that's why we sent a high-powered delegation."
The interim government last met their Islamist rivals in Khartoum on June 22. They agreed then to stop military campaigns and recognise each other.

But government allegations that the Islamists have broken the pact against military expansion, and Islamist claims of foreign interference in Somalia, have stalled the discussions.

"There is always hope," Ugas Ahmed Bile, a member of the Islamist delegation, told Reuters.
"But we need to discuss with the government the presence of those troops in our country before any agreement is reached," he said, referring to Islamist claims that Ethiopian and Ugandan troops have entered Somalia to support the interim government.

The government's new Defence Minister Bare Aden Shire on Thursday urged countries in the region that have discussed sending peacekeeping troops to Somalia to instead help it to build up its own national armed forces.

"I am against the deployment of foreign troops," Shire told Reuters from the Somali town of Kismayu. "We have our own troops, Somalia's former national forces are present, they should be reintegrated."

International donors on Tuesday said they were ready to help rebuild Somalia, but only if the interim government can agree to share power with the Islamists and end 15 years of fighting.