By Jason McLure and Hamsa Omar
Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Somalia’s transitional parliament chose a former leader of the country’s ousted Islamic Courts Union government as president, a United Nations official said.
Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a moderate Islamist who was chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, was selected today after two rounds of voting, Charles Petrie, the deputy special representative for the UN’s Political Office for Somalia, said in a telephone interview from Djibouti.
Ahmed defeated Maslah Mohamed Siad Barre, the son of former dictator Mohamed Said Barre, by 293 votes to 126 in the second round. Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein withdrew after the first round, in which he received 59 votes, Petrie said.
Somalia is in its 18th year of a civil war that has displaced 1 million people and left 3.2 million in need of food aid, according to the UN. The Horn of Africa nation hasn’t had a functioning central administration since the ouster of Siad Barre in 1991.
. Ahmed, speaking following his election, said he wanted to create a government of national unity, and promised to reach out to groups not included in the transitional parliament, an indirect reference to the hard-line Islamist al-Shabaab militia that controls much of southern Somalia. He also reached out to neighboring countries, saying “his interests were in creating a stable Somalia, but not an aggressive Somalia,” said Petrie.
Invasion
Ahmed is a former teacher who helped found the Islamic Courts Union which took control of Mogadishu and much of southern Somalia from U.S.-backed warlords in mid-2006. From his base in Mogadishu he became chairman of the movement, though his power was soon eclipsed by more radical Islamist elements.
The U.S., fearing that the ICU was sheltering al-Qaeda terrorists, supported an invasion by neighboring Ethiopia in December 2006. Ahmed fled ahead of Ethiopian troops and surrendered to Kenyan security forces in January 2007. He was later released and became head of the Alliance for the Re- Liberation of Somalia, a group of moderate Islamist sheikhs, clan-leaders and businessmen opposed to the Ethiopian-backed transitional federal government.
His group signed a preliminary peace agreement with the transitional government in Djibouti in June. Following the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops and the resignation of Ethiopia’s ally, President Abdullahi Yusuf, Ahmed’s faction formally joined the government earlier this week.
In an interview with Bloomberg News in August in his hotel room in Djibouti, Ahmed spoke of reconciling with al-Shabaab, which now controls a large swathe of southern Somalia and has instituted Shari’a law in Baidoa, the nominal seat of the Somali parliament. He also indicated that he may not share the U.S. view of terrorism in Somalia, saying that he was not aware of any al-Qaeda operatives in the country. Hassan al-Turki, named by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist, is just a “normal Somali man,” Ahmed said. The U.S. has launched a number of air raids into Somalia in the past two years, targeting alleged al- Qaeda members.
