Somali al-Shabab fighters flogged 32 dancers for violating strict Sharia edicts after arresting them for taking part in a traditional dance near the capital Mogadishu, officials and elders said.The team was flogged in Balad township, 30 kilometers (18 miles) north of the capital Mogadishu, where they were arrested overnight while performing a folklore dance. "They were found dancing to traditional songs outside Balad last night and were flogged this morning. They were arrested by Islamist fighters," said Mohamed Sheikh Hussein, an elder.
'Strict Sharia'
Islamist spokesmanThe fighters who are enforcing a strict form of Sharia law have been slowly advancing on the city, raising the stakes in their two-year rebellion and undermining fragile U.N. brokered peace talks to end 17 years of chaos in the Horn of Africa nation.
Last month, they stoned to death a young woman accused of adultery in the southern port of Kismayu.
Islamist spokesman Sheikh Abdirahim Isse Adow said those arrested had been warned several times against dancing. "We arrested 25 women and seven men who were dancing near Balad (town). We released them after whipping them. We warned them many times, but they wouldn't listen," he told Reuters.
| "The dancing of men and women together is illegal and totally against Islam. We neither killed them nor injured them, but only whipped them according to the Islamic law." |
Last month's stoning to death of the woman in Kismayu was the first such public killing by the hardline militants for about two years and drew international condemnation.
The Islamists, despite bringing much-needed peace and stability, carried out public executions when they ruled Mogadishu and most of south Somalia for half of 2006. Allied Ethiopian and Somali government forces toppled them at the end of that year, but they have waged an Iraq-style guerrilla campaign since then, gradually taking back territory.
'Creeping Talibanisation'
When in power in 2006, the Islamists carried out executions, shut cinemas and photo shops, banned live music, flogged drug offenders and harassed women for failing to wear appropriate dress in public.
Alarmed by the strict and fundamentalist version of Sharia law, the United States led Western concern over a "creeping Talibanisation" in Somalia by the Islamists.
Somalia has had no effective government since the 1991 ouster of President Siad Barre touched off a bloody power struggle that has defied numerous attempts to restore stability.
The turmoil in Somalia has fuelled instability across the Horn of Africa, fuelling one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters and triggering a wave of pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden, a vital shipping lane for trade between Europe and Asia.