Somalia: Muslims behead convert from Islam to Christianity

By Robert Spencer

Muhammad said: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him” (Bukhari 9.84.57). The death penalty for apostasy is part of Islamic law according to all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Yet Muslim spokesmen such as Harris Zafar,Mustafa Akyol, Salam al-Marayati, M. Cherif Bassiouni, and Ali Eteraz (among many others) have assured us that Islam doesn’t punish apostasy. I expect that Zafar, Akyol, al-Marayati, Bassiouni, and Eteraz will immediately be jetting over to Mogadishu to explain to al-Shabaab that they’re getting Islam all wrong, wrong, wrong, and should stop beheading converts immediately.

“Christian Convert from Islam Beheaded in Somalia,” from Morning Star News, November 17 (thanks to all who sent this in):

NAIROBI, Kenya (Morning Star News) – Islamic extremists from Somalia’s rebel Al-Shabaab militants on Friday (Nov. 16) killed a Christian in Somalia’s coastal city of Barawa, accusing him of being a spy and leaving Islam, Christian and Muslim witnesses said.The extremists beheaded 25-year-old Farhan Haji Mose after monitoring his movements for six months, Christian sources said. Mose drew suspicion when he returned to Barawa, in Somalia’s Lower Shebelle Region, in December 2011 after spending time in Kenya, underground Christians in Somalia told Morning Star News.

Kenya’s population is nearly 83 percent Christian, according to Operation World, while Somalia’s is close to 100 percent Muslim….

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Sharia: What it’s like being governed by Al Qaeda

By Tristan McConnell

The port town of Kismayo on Somalia’s southern coast must be among the worst places on the planet to live right now.

Not only is it governed by the fanatical Al Qaeda cousin Al Shabaab, it is also a battleground where a regional coalition of African armies is attempting to fight the extremist group.

While African Union officials claim that Al Shabaab will be defeated by next month, residents aren’t taking any chances. They are fleeing the city by the thousands.

Many of them land here, in the town of Ras Kamboni, about 300 kilometers to the south. And their testimony is providing a rare insight into what it’s like to live under Al Qaeda’s rule.

For Jama Jibril, a wage laborer, the public flogging he received for possessing a cigarette was the final straw.

For a time, Jibril tolerated the gangs of men patrolling the town, armed with scissors, who would chop inches off ankle length trousers in a bid to make residents follow what they said was the Prophet Mohamed’s dress code.

He learned to keep his hair closely cropped, for the scissor-wielding gangs monitored that as well. He suffered the discomfort of growing a full beard, giving up his neatly trimmed goatee. And always made sure his fingernails were short.

One day, as he walked home from work, Al Shabaab’s morality police stopped him. They searched his bag of groceries and found what Jibril said was a single cigarette. He had bought the contraband in the market using a code word known to the city’s smokers, he said.

He had planned to lock himself in his house, close the shutters and enjoy a smoke, one of the few pleasures left in a city where the traditional Somali past time of chewing khat, a mild stimulant, is banned.

But Jibril was caught. He was arrested on the spot, interrogated and urged to name his conspirators. Not wanting to give up his friends, he was locked up for two days.

“Us smokers are colleagues. We stick together. We smoke together,” he said.

After his release he was taken before a Shariah court, which sentenced him to a public flogging. It was carried out at once.

Jibril — who smoked as he retold this story from the safety of Ras Kamboni — was indignant because his punisher, he said, whipped him 11 times instead of 10.

In recent years, Al Shabaab has made Kismayo its base of operations, earning as much as $50 million in annual revenues from the busy port. It has established training camps in the nearby forests, and allows pirate groups to use the secluded beaches, islands and mangrove swamps as way-stations.

Al Shabaab says it wants to place Somalia (and beyond) under the yolk of a draconian form of Shariah law, styled after the Taliban’s rule. In February, the group declared itself the latest member of Al Qaeda’s global corporation.

While Al Shabaab is on the defensive in other parts of the region, and has been driven out of Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, it still very much runs the show in Kismayo.

Former residents said the militants have created a police state, where everyone is under the watch of Al Shabaab spies.

Using a cell phone, listening to the radio, drinking one cup of tea too many, chewing khat, or skipping prayers, could all trigger a visit from the masked gunmen who stay in military camps encircling the town.

“You always fear when you see them,” said one resident who, like most GlobalPost spoke to, did not want to be named. “Whether innocent or not, you fear. You don’t know when they might come.”….

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Somalia: Muslims observe Sharia, amputate accused thief’s hand

By Robert Spencer

“And the thief, male and female: cut off the hands of both, as a recompense for what they have earned, and a punishment exemplary from God; God is All-mighty, All-wise. ” — Qur’an 5:38

This is Sharia. Opponents of anti-Sharia laws in the U.S. have never adequately explained why this and other noxious elements of Sharia will not be part of Islamic law as they observe it here. They say Muslims are bound to obey the laws of the land in which they find themselves, but they conveniently fail to mention that Muslims are also bound to try to bring Sharia to those lands. And the media, as clueless and/or complicit as ever, never challenges Sharia advocates such as the Imam Faisal Abdul “Man of Peace” Rauf, or Ibrahim “Honest Ibe” Hooper, or Boy Reza Aslan with questions about this.

“Somali militants chop man’s arm off,” by Abdulkadir Khalif in Africa Review, April 13 (thanks to David):

Somalia Islamic militants Al-Shabaab Thursday amputated the hand of a man accused of theft at Alamada, 18km south of Mogadishu.The amputation of the young man, identified only as Mohamed, was witnessed by a large crowd of onlookers….

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Monsters: Somalia: Al-Shabaab abducting teenage girls to “marry” jihadists

by Marisol

Actually, that’s called rape, not marriage. But the Qur’an provides for sexual relations with “those whom your right hands possess,” whether they are already married or not (4:24).

Don’t like it? Don’t blame us. We didn’t write it, and we’re not the ones acting on it. Direct your outrage at those who are. “Al-Shabaab militia abducting teenage girls to marry fighters,” by Alex Spillius for the Telegraph, February 21:

The report by Human Rights Watch also found that as fighting has intensified over the past two years, al-Shabaab has increasingly targeted boys as young as 10 for action on the frontline to join its dwindling ranks. Whole classrooms have been forced at gunpoint to leave school and fight. Researchers found that after several weeks of harsh training child recruits are sent for action where they often serve as “cannon fodder” to protect adult fighters.

Such intrepid, manly mujahedin.

“It is a new, disturbing pattern using children as human shields,” said Laetitia Bader, one of the principal authors and researchers of the report.Boys who escaped camps were either mown down or faced long and terrifying journeys to sanctuary elsewhere in Somalia or across the border in Kenya.

Girls who resisted capture can face the most appalling consequences, Human Rights Watch found. A 16-year-old girl who refused to marry an al-Shabaab commander who was three times her age was killed by his men and beheaded. Her head was brought back to the school as a warning to others.

Now would be as good a time as any to remind of the prevalence of infibulation — the most severe form of female genital mutilation — in Somalia, as if rape itself were not enough…

More:  http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/02/somalia-al-shabaab-abducting-teenage-girls-to-marry-jihadists.html

Somalia’s Dire Lessons for Afghanistan

by Daniel Greenfield

Anyone interested in seeing the future of Afghanistan need only take a short plane trip from Italy across Libya and Sudan to what is the most dysfunctional territory in Africa. Somalia can’t be properly called a state, more of a prolonged clumsy civil war fought between rival gangs of Islamists, some of whom have American backing and some of whom don’t.

Somalia is Afghanistan on caffeine, not because it’s more violent, but because it covered the same span of history in half the time from when Operation Enduring Freedom expanded into the Horn of Africa during Bush’s second term, pushing out the Islamic Courts Union, the local equivalent of the Taliban, to the negotiations several years later that brought members of the Islamic Courts Union into the Transitional Federal Government and made them the majority, to the ongoing civil war between the ragged bands of Islamist militias fighting over the remains of the country under the watchful eye of peacekeeping troops.

Somalia is what Afghanistan will look like if the Obama administration and its Brotherhood friends succeed in convincing some Taliban leaders to split off and join the government. The bloody farce in which the former commander in chief of the Islamic Courts Union, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, serves as the president of a Somalia, and Sharif Hassan, who was a IUC supporter, serves as speaker of a Somali parliament which is dominated by Islamists and which voted to implement Sharia law two years ago, could be the bright and shining future of Afghanistan.

While the “moderate” Islamists of the UIC run that small portion of Somalia which American drones and African Union troops keep under their control, the “immoderate” former members of the UIC’s militias try to push them out while forcing children and the elderly to fight for them, and stoning young girls to death who don’t agree to sexually service their troops.

The agreement which led to this ridiculous Somali standoff was the work of the same diplomatic corps that thinks sending in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Yusuf al-Qaradawi to split off some “moderate” Taliban leaders will secure the future of Afghanistan. Last time around the Brotherhood talked the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group into taking a few discreet steps away from Al-Qaeda and signing on to a political solution with Qaddafi. The political solution allowed the LIFG to join in a broad front civil war that will likely see Libya end up under Islamic rule. That is probably what Qaradawi also has in mind for Afghanistan.

But Afghanistan is more likely to look like Somalia than Libya, which had the relics of a national structure that Afghanistan still lacks. With Pakistan, Iran and countless other players sticking their thumbs into the mix and backing their own militias, the stage could be set for the kind of prolonged and bloody insanity that has seen multiple Islamist militias fighting each other across Somalia.

Somalia also represents the early phase when the War on Terror descended into an incoherent mission whose purpose was no longer to fight Islamic terrorists, but to find some Islamic terrorists willing to run for office. But no matter how often foreign policy experts praised the Islamic Courts Union for bringing stability to Somalia, the only kind of stability they brought was at the point of a sharpened machete or an AK-47…

More: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/06/somalia%e2%80%99s-lessons-for-afghanistan/