Militants linked to al Qaeda known as al Shabaab have been waging an insurgency for almost twenty years with the ultimate goal to oust Somalia’s central government and impose the jihadists’ version of Islamic sharia law.
Puntland, an autonomous territory of Somalia, shot dead 10 men from the al Shabaab militant on Saturday.
Currently a terror organization aligned with Al Qaeda, al-Shabaab, was formed in the early 2000s to set up an Islamic state in Somalia. For the last twenty years or so, Somalia has been unstable, with no effective central government and much internal strife.
The executions by firing squad were conducted in Galkayo in the state’s Mudug region after a trial of the fighters by a military court in which they were condemned to death for assassinations and bombings in different places in Galkayo.
The executed fighters “were earlier given the death penalty by the supreme court of the armed forces after they were linked to murders in the city of Galkayo,” police told AFP.
The origin of al-Shabaab’s recruitment strategy stemmed from the basis of offering protective security to the people. The latter resulted from the refusal of supplies of western aid in the form of food during 2011 that caused a severe shortage of food back in the country and a consequent famine.
Al Qaeda-affiliated group Al-Shabaab rebels have been waging an insurgency for almost two decades with the primary goal of ejecting the central Somali government and replacing it with one embracing the militants’ version of an Islamic-approved Sarawiah law.
