First lot of Somali soldiers come home from Eritrea
Mogadishu, Somalia (AFP):
The first batch of 5,000 Somali men sent to train as soldiers in Eritrea have returned home to be deployed against insurgents.
Their return ends months of worry among families who feared they might have been recruited under false pretense and held captive.
Somali defence minister Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur described it as “good news” that they had been brought home to the Horn of Africa nation.
It will have “so much meaning for the ongoing military operations,” he added, referring to the fight against the violent rebel group Al-Shabaab.
“The rest of the troops will return in the next couple of days,” Nur said, without disclosing how many had come back already.
Rumours had spread in the country of 17 million people that the soldiers may have been deployed to the war-torn Ethiopian region of Tigray.
“This will be a blow to the evildoers (Al-Shabaab), and anyone else who is doing harm in the country,” Nur said.
Somalian President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who had pledged to bring the soldiers home in his election campaign, visited them in training camps in Eritrea in July.
Mohamud had said on Monday that bringing all the soldiers home would take until January.
Families without news of their relatives in the army protested several times last year during the presidency of Mohamud’s predecessor Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed- better known as ‘Farmajo’- demanding information about their whereabouts.
The UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea- Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker- in June last year referred to “reports that Somali soldiers were moved from military training camps in Eritrea to the frontline in Tigray, where they accompanied Eritrean troops” against rebels.
Somalia has been wrecked by decades of civil war, political violence and insurgency.
Forced out of the country’s main urban centres around 10 years ago, Al-Shabaab has been waging an insurgency against Somalia’s internationally-backed federal government.
They remain entrenched in vast swathes of rural central and southern Somalia and continue to carry out deadly attacks in the capital Mogadishu.
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