Somali Regional Chief Denies Terror Cells in Area

30/05/2001| IslamWeb

NAIROBI (Reuters) - The president of an autonomous region in Somalia cited by the United States as a possible haven for Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda militants insisted Tuesday the area had been free of extremists for almost a decade.
Jama Ali Jama, elected in November as president of the internationally unrecognized region of Puntland, made the statement in an interview with Reuters.
Somalia, without a central government since 1991 and controlled by a transitional government and rival warlords, has been named as one of the countries the United States could target in a widened war on terror beyond Afghanistan.
Soon after the September 11 hijacked plane attacks on U.S. landmarks, Washington named the Somali al-Itihad al-Islamiya movement on a list of groups linked to bin Laden's Islamist al Qaeda network.
Italy singled out the northeast Somali Puntland region earlier this month as a possible refuge for al Qaeda fighters fleeing Afghanistan.
There has been speculation that the al-Itihad group remains active in parts of Somalia including the northern coastal town of Las Qoray in the Puntland region.
But Jama Ali Jama denied that there were any al-Itihad camps in the region and said most Somali people had never even heard of al Qaeda until after September 11.
Al-Itihad first came to prominence in the early 1990s as a military group which aimed to create a unified Islamic state in Somalia and the ethnic Somali region of neighboring Ethiopia.
It claimed responsibility for several bomb attacks in the Ethiopian capital in 1996, but Somali experts say that it now appears to have shifted its focus to building a political base, partly through humanitarian work.