MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) – Pressure on the Somali government is mounting amid allegations that Somali soldiers have been sent to fight in the deadly conflict in Tigray, Ethiopia.
The mothers held rare protests in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, and elsewhere, demanding to know the fate of their children, who were originally sent to Eritrea for military training. They fear that their children have been sent to the Tigray region, where Ethiopian forces have been fighting the Tigray since November in a conflict that threatens to destabilize the Horn of Africa.
“I heard that our children who were sent to Eritrea for military training were taken and their responsibility was handed over to (Ethiopian Prime Minister) Abiy Ahmed to fight for him”, Fatuma Moallim Abdulle, mother of a 20 year old soldier Ahmed Ibrahim Jumaleh , he told the Associated Press.
“According to the information I obtained, our children were taken directly to the city of Mekele,” she said. “You can understand how I feel, I am a mother who carried her child in my belly for nine months, this is my blood and my flesh.”
Ethiopia this week denied reports of the presence of Somali soldiers in Tigray and continued to deny the presence of Eritrean soldiers.
Abiy made peace with neighboring Eritrea in 2018, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Critics now say the forces of Ethiopia and Eritrea have joined in the conflict against a common enemy, the now fugitive Tigray leaders, who dominated the government of Ethiopia for almost three decades before Abiy took office and initiated a regional peace process that included Somalia.
Somalia’s President Abdullahi Mohamed Abdullahi was invited by the head of the country’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee, Abdulqadir Ossoble Ali, to investigate allegations of participation in the Tigray conflict.
“We have the supervisory right to verify what our government is doing,” Ali wrote in the letter distributed to the media.
And the former deputy director of the Somali intelligence agency, Ismael Dahir Osman, said that “it is worth asking why these soldiers have not yet returned home after more than a year, when their training would have ended a long time ago. . “
Somalia’s Information Minister Osman Abokor Dubbe this week denied the “propaganda” that Somali soldiers who were out of the country for training were involved in the Tigray conflict.
“There are no Somali soldiers requested by the Ethiopian government to fight for them and to fight in Tigray,” he said.
The problem came at a delicate time in Somalia. The country is expected to hold national elections in the coming weeks, but two federal states have refused to participate and the opposition accuses the president of trying to advance a partial vote.
“The parents of these children continue to call us and have no contact with their children, and some of them have been informed that their children have died,” an opposition presidential candidate, Abdurahman Abdishakur Warsame, told the AP. “According to the information we are receiving, these boys were taken to war in northern Ethiopia. We are calling an independent national commission to investigate the matter and, if it is proved to be true, it will be a betrayal on a national scale ”.