By Jack Kimball
13 minutes ago
ASMARA (Reuters) - Militant Somali Islamist leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, in hiding since a war ousted his movement from southern Somalia at the end of 2006, appeared on Thursday at a conference in Eritrea.
The bespectacled Aweys, who some believe is behind an anti-government insurgency in Mogadishu, sat in a grey suit at the front at the opening of a meeting of Somali opposition figures in a conference hall in Asmara.
As the talks began with Koranic prayers, Aweys -- who is on U.S. and U.N. lists of al Qaeda suspects -- was flanked by another Islamist leader, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, the former Somali parliamentary speaker and Somalia's former interior minister.
A U.N. report last year accused the 72-year-old of running militant training camps and of receiving weapons from Eritrea, which was hoping to frustrate its arch-foe Ethiopia.
Ethiopian forces are supporting Somalia's interim government, and experts say the public appearance of the hardline cleric in Asmara was bound to infuriate Addis Ababa.
Aweys, who has denied any links to al Qaeda, is one of Somalia's survivors. He was a colonel in the army of former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, when he was decorated for bravery in a war against Ethiopia in 1977.
By the 1990s, he was leading Somalia's biggest militant Islamist group, al-Ittihad al-Islami. But he was defeated then by Ethiopian forces and Somalia warlords backed by Addis Ababa, among them Somalia's current interim president, Abdullahi Yusuf.
Aweys' fighters seized control of Mogadishu and much of the south last year, and the remnants of his sharia courts movement are now blamed for an Iraq-style insurgency targeting government and Ethiopian forces, mostly with roadside bombs.
U.S. officials in the region had no immediate comment on the re-emergence of Aweys, who is thought to have spent most of this year hiding somewhere in remote southern Somalia.
About 300 guests were at the start of the meeting in the centre of the Eritrean capital, where many Somali Islamists and political opposition leaders have been based in recent months.
Representatives of the United Nations, France, Israel and the European Commission also attended.
The Somali delegates say they want to free their homeland from what they say are Ethiopian occupiers who helped the interim government oust Aweys' Islamists over the New Year.
Fighting has continued in the Somali capital despite a bigger reconciliation conference that ended there last week with the government pledging to solve the security crisis.
