By Abdinasir Mohamed, editor in-chief 

MOGADISHU (Sunatimes)- Somalia’s Islamist rebel group has issued eviction notices to hundreds of IDPs living outside Somali capital where they have occupied for two years in defiance of the refgees’ rights.

Armed Hizbul Islam rebel fighters have entered Taredishe camp, outside Mogadishu and ordered dozens of desperate families who earlier fled Mogadishu to dislocate further to make the camp as the palace of their hardline leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys.

"They have to leave—its unsuitable them to stay further” Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the group’s leader told reporters.

“The camp is not for them but for government” he said.

The IDPs who don’t know a third place to go have defied an eviction order and had to get by without electricity and water in the huts covered camps after the militants made shut down.

For this appalling order, the rebel group faces widespread anger about forced evictions, and planned residency for their leader. The rebels have also made legal to property confiscation rules that do not go far enough to address the potentially destabilising issue in the desperate camps.

In addition to the hundreds of thousands of IDPs fleeing insecurity and violence in Mogadishu, thousands of other residents and long-term IDPs - displaced at the start of the civil war in the early 1990s - are reported to have been evicted from their homes in government and public buildings, according to a civil society source.

The horn of Africa nation has been without central government since1991 after clan militias and warlords overthrown the dictator regime of Siad Barre that lastly leashed out to constant violence  more than 20 years.

SOURCE: SUNATIMES

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