Mogadishu – The first batch of 5 000 Somali men sent to train as soldiers in Eritrea returned home on Wednesday to be deployed against an Islamist insurgency, a minister said.
Their return ends months of worry among families who feared they might have been recruited under false pretence and held captive.
Somali defence minister Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur described it as “good news” that they had been brought home to the Horn of Africa nation.
It will have “so much meaning for the ongoing military operations,” he added, referring to the fight against the Islamist rebel group Al-Shabaab.
“The rest of the troops will return in the next couple of days,” Nur said, without disclosing how many had come back on Wednesday.
Rumours had swirled in the country of 17 million people that the soldiers may have been deployed to the war-torn Ethiopian region of Tigray.
“This will be a blow to the evildoers (Al-Shabaab), and anyone else who is doing harm in the country,” Nur said.
Somalia President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who had pledged to bring the soldiers home in his election campaign, visited them in training camps in Eritrea in July.
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Mohamud said on Monday that bringing all the soldiers home would take until January.
Families without news of their relatives in the army protested several times last year during the presidency of Mohamud’s predecessor Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, better known as Farmajo, demanding information about their whereabouts.
The UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea, Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker, in June last year referred to “reports that Somali soldiers were moved from military training camps in Eritrea to the frontline in Tigray, where they accompanied Eritrean troops” supporting Ethiopian federal forces against rebels.
Farmajo said their training ended last year but he had decided to delay their return to avoid disrupting parliamentary and presidential elections.
Somalia has been wracked by decades of civil war, political violence and an Islamist insurgency.
Forced out of the country’s main urban centres around 10 years ago, Al-Shabaab have been waging a bloody insurgency against Somalia’s internationally backed federal government for 15 years.
They remain entrenched in vast swathes of rural central and southern Somalia and continues to carry out deadly attacks in the capital Mogadishu.
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Source: AFP
Picture: Pexels
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