2014: A Barawe bigamist

From Voice Of America news, dateline Saturday, September 28, 2014:

A Somali woman has been publicly stoned to death for being married to several men at the same time.

The 33-year-old woman was put to death Friday in the southern coastal town of Barawe, which is controlled by the Islamist militant group al-Shabab.

The woman had confessed to being married to at least three men at the same time.

She was buried in soil up to her neck and pelted with stones by masked executioners, as a crowd looked on.

Al-Shabab, which is linked to al-Qaida, controls wide swaths of Somalian territory, where it imposes a strict interpretation of sharia law.

Al-Shabaab was pushed out of Barawe by government troops a few weeks after the stoning. The Islamic rebel movement continues to hold sway in large, mostly rural, chunks of southern Somalia.

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2009: Two Somali spies

MOGADISHU, Oct. 25 (Xinhua) — Somalia’s Al Shabaab Islamist movement on Sunday executed two young men for alleged spying for the Somali government in the southern town of Marka.

The radical group has been waging insurgency for two years against the Somali government and the African Union peacekeeping forces in the capital Mogadishu.

After the execution was carried out in central Marka town, an official from the group told crowds of local people who gathered to watch the punishment that the men were convicted of spying for the Somali government after “they confessed to the crime.”

“The men were executed because of apostasy and for spying for the apostate government. After three months of investigation and their confession to the crime they were executed in accordance with the Islamic law,” said Sheikh Sultan, an Al Shabaab official in Marka.

Residents said that the young men were executed by firing squad of Al Shabaab fighters as crowds, mainly women and children, looked on the capital punishment.

The hardline Islamist group of Al Shabaab controls much of southern and central Somalia and usually carries out amputations, executions, and floggings of criminals and opposition individuals in areas under their control, including parts of the Somali capital. The Islamist group, which is considered by the Somali government and the United States as a terrorist organization, declares a fight to establish an Islamic State in Somalia.

The Reuters report on this same incident adds a witness describing that “One of the boys did not die easily, so about eight masked al Shabaab men went close and opened fire on him. Soon his body looked like chopped-up meat because of the many gunshots.”

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2011: Ahmed Ali Hussein, enemy cleric

On this date last year, the Islamist Somali al-Shabaab publicly shot a man named Ahmed Ali Hussein in Mogadishu.

The 44-year-old, reportedly an ecclesiastic member of the rival al-Ictisam sect, was allegedly induced to confess that he’d been working with American intelligence. He was chained up and riddled with hundreds of bullets while neighbors were made to watch.

“In the documents we have, Ahmed Ali Hussein has worked with United States’ Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI) for 16 months,” an al-Shabaab spokesperson explained. Hussein was not permitted to defend himself.

So, extrajudicial killing of cleric on uncontested secret evidence of aiding the enemy. Put Somalia down for the cutting edge of jurisprudence.

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2010: An al Shabaab rebel commander

According to a Reuters report, it was on this date last year that an al Shabaab militant was publicly shot in Somalia by a pro-government militia.

Al Shabaab — “the youth” — is an offshoot from the (now-history) Islamist alliance involved in that whole Black Hawk Down unpleasantness.

You might remember them from this summer’s World Cup: they’re the guys who bombed World Cup viewers in Uganda, killing 76. Al Shabaab (allegedly al Qaeda-linked) basically controls southern Somalia with its allies.

“We don’t normally kill al Shabaab members,” explained a spokesman for the Ahlu Sunna Waljama’a paramilitary, in cheerily chilling terms. “We arrest them and make them understand that Islam means peace.”

The unnamed character we notice this date apparently failed to “understand,” and was shot for not renouncing his affiliation.

“This commander insisted that all people were infidels except his group … We will execute al Shabaab members who insist that it can be right to kill the innocent. What else are we supposed to do to those who believe they will go to paradise for killing us and the whole human race?”

The execution nevertheless failed to quell the intractable Somali Civil War.

Part of the Themed Set: 2010.

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