Somali govt says will form team to meet Islamists

[General Duke]

Somali govt says will form team to meet Islamists

 

By Guled Mohamed

 

 

MOGADISHU, July 16 (Reuters) - Somalia's government agreed on Sunday to form a committee to attend future peace talks with the country's newly powerful Islamists, after rejecting a round of planned negotiations over the weekend.

 

The deal to form the committee was brokered among Somalia's parliamentary speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan, President Abdullahi Yusuf and Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Gedi.

 

It means the government will create a reconciliation team to meet the Islamists in a continuation of the Arab League-brokered talks.

 

"They will form a joint committee now. We don't know when," Deputy Speaker Mohamed Omar Dalha, who attended the meeting, told Reuters.

 

Yusuf had rejected Saturday's planned talks with the Islamists in the Sudanese capital, saying they had broken an earlier agreement and sent low-level officials who could not make decisions.

 

The Islamists, who were formed from an alliance of sharia courts, are the main threat to the fragile authority of Yusuf's government.

 

The Islamists kicked U.S.-backed warlords out of the capital Mogadishu and took over a swathe of the country last month.

 

Many fear the Islamists -- led by Yusuf foe and hardline cleric Hassan Dahir Aweys -- and the government will fight for supremacy of the Horn of Africa country of 10 million people.

 

Militia sources on Sunday said the Islamists cut a deal with fighters who guard Baledogle airport, the midway point on the road between the capital and the government's base in Baidoa, 240 km (150 miles) northwest.

 

"Senior Islamic courts officials yesterday met with us to discuss a joint defence line," a senior Baledogle militiaman who declined to be named told Reuters.

 

"The defence line seeks to prevent any possible attacks on Mogadishu. They will join us anytime."

 

The Islamists could not be immediately reached for comment.

 

Security sources last week told Reuters that the government planned to send militiamen as far as Baledogle, to advance their forward outpost in case of attack.

 

The government said it has no plans of marching towards Mogadishu.

 

"We are for dialogue and want the agreement reached to be strictly guarded in order to create an atmosphere of dialogue," spokesman Abdirahman Dinari said.

 

Four years after the 1991 ouster of former president Mohamed Siad Barre turned Somalia into a byword for statelessness, Baledogle -- once Somalia's largest military airfield -- became a popular landing site for civilian aircraft.

 

Source: Reuters, July 16, 2006

[Duufaan]

did the somali websites miss this news? or another typical Rueter news from somalia