Barbaric practice is true face of Shariah
Somali Islamists have stoned to death a woman accused of adultery in the first such public killing by the militants for about two years.
The 23-year-old woman was executed late on Monday in front of hundreds of people in the southern port of Kismayu, which the Islamist insurgents captured in August, witnesses said.
Guards opened fire when a relative ran forward, killing a child, they said. “A woman in green veil and black mask was brought in a car as we waited to watch the merciless act of stoning,” one local resident, Abdullahi Aden told.
“We were told she submitted herself to be punished, yet we could see her screaming as she was forcefully bound, legs and hands. A relative of hers ran towards her, but the Islamists opened fire and killed a child.” The Islamists last 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 territory back.
As when they ruled Mogadishu in 2006, the Islamists now controlling the Kismayu area are again providing much-needed security, but also imposing fundamentalist practices such as banning entertainment seen as anti-Islamic.