MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) – Pressure on the Somali government is mounting amid allegations that Somali soldiers have been sent to fight in neighboring Ethiopia’s deadly Tigray conflict.
Mothers have held rare protests in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, and elsewhere, to know the fate of their children who were originally sent to Eritrea for military training. They fear their children have been deployed to the Tigray region, where Ethiopian forces have been fighting Tigray forces since November in a conflict that threatens to destabilize the Horn of Africa.
“I have heard that our children sent to Eritrea for military training have been taken in and their responsibility has been transferred to (Ethiopian Prime Minister) Abiy Ahmed to fight for him,” Fatuma Moallim Abdulle, the mother of a 20-year-old soldier Ahmed Ibrahim Jumaleh, told The Associated Press.
“According to the information I gathered, our children were taken directly to the city of Mekele,” she said. “You may understand how I feel, I am a mother who carried her child in my womb for nine months, that is my blood and flesh.”
Ethiopia this week denied reports of the presence of Somali soldiers in Tigray, and it continued to deny the presence of Eritrean soldiers.
Abiy made peace with neighboring Eritrea in 2018, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Now critics say Ethiopian and Eritrean forces have teamed up in the conflict against a common enemy: the now fugitive Tigray leaders, who dominated the Ethiopian government for nearly three decades before Abiy took office and engaged in regional peacemaking efforts, including Somalia.
Somali President Abdullahi Mohamed Abdullahi has been asked by the head of the country’s parliamentary committee on foreign affairs, Abdulqadir Ossoble Ali, to investigate allegations of participation in the Tigray conflict.
“We have a right to monitor what our government is doing,” Ali wrote in the letter distributed to the media.
And former deputy director of Somali intelligence, Ismael Dahir Osman, said: “It is worth asking why these soldiers are not home after more than a year when their training would have ended long ago.”
Somali Information Minister Osman Abokor Dubbe this week denied the “propaganda” that Somali soldiers who had been outside the country for training were involved in the Tigray conflict.
“There are no Somali troops that the Ethiopian government has requested to fight for them and fight in Tigray,” he said.
The issue has come up at a sensitive time in Somalia. The country is holding national elections in the coming weeks, but two federal states have refused to participate and the opposition has accused the president of going ahead with a partial vote.
“The parents of those children keep calling us and they have no contact with their children, and some of them were told that their boys have died,” an opposition presidential candidate, Abdurahman Abdishakur Warsame, told the AP. “According to the information we receive, those boys were taken to the war in Northern Ethiopia. We are calling for an independent national commission to investigate the matter, and if proven to be true, it will amount to treason on a national scale. “