Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden called on radical Islamists in Somalia to overthrow new President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, an audiotape posted on the Internet on Thursday showed.
Ahmed, a moderate Islamist, was elected president of the war-ravaged African state in January following UN-brokered reconciliation talks but faces a tough task to bring peace to a country wracked by civil war since 1991.
“This Sheikh Sharif ... must be fought and toppled,” bin Laden said in a message addressed to the “champions of Somalia,” the third audiotape attributed to bin Laden that has been broadcast this year.
“He is like the [Arab] presidents who are in the pay of our enemies,” he said in the tape, whose authenticity could not be immediately confirmed.
Somalia has had no effective central authority since the 1991 ouster of former president Mohamed Siad Barre touched off a bloody cycle of clashes between rival factions.
Bin Laden said Ahmed has “changed and turned on his heels” as a result of American “enticements” and agreed to mix Islamic Shariah law with civic laws in the troubled Horn of Africa country.
The Somali Cabinet agreed on Tuesday to introduce Islamic law, a move Ahmed said was “to ensure that he who claims that he is fighting to have Shariah no longer has a reason to fight.”
Bin Laden warned Islamist militants against heeding calls to be patient and give Ahmed time to implement Shariah.
“My Muslim brothers in Somalia: You must beware of the initiatives which wear the dress of Islam ... like the initiative attributed to some of the ulama [academics] of Somalia which gives Sheikh Sharif six months to implement Islamic Shariah,” he said.
“They are asking him [to build] something he was in fact installed to demolish,” he said. “It is a duty to fight the apostate government and not stop the battle.”
Islamist fighters, including the hardline Shebab militia, have waged battles against the government and its allies since and before Ahmed came to power, vowing to fight until all foreign forces withdraw and Shariah law is imposed.
The Shebab is a hardline Islamist organization opposed to Ahmed’s national unity government and which controls large swathes of Somalia.
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