Ahmed Abdi Godane: the new 'Mad Mullah’ bent on jihad
By Colin Freeman
WITH his background in accountancy and enthusiasm for poetry, Sheikh Ahmed Abdi Godane is an unlikely candidate to be Africa’s most feared militant leader.
But with the Nairobi shopping mall atrocity, the bookish 36-year-old leader of Somalia’s al-Shabab Islamist movement has achieved a long-running ambition to join the very top tier of global terrorism.
Last Wednesday, Godane promised more violence if Kenya refused to withdraw its forces from neighbouring Somalia, where they have been fighting al-Shabaab in its southern heartlands.
“You cannot withstand a war of attrition inside your own country,” he said in an audio message posted on a website linked to al-Shabaab. “So withdraw all your forces, or be prepared for an abundance of blood that will be spilt in your country.”
But his fondness for venting his hatred of the West through poetry − a mode of expression that has a long political tradition in Somalia − also makes him the direct descendant of another insurgent figure from Somali history, Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, the so-called “Mad Mullah” who waged war against the British colonial presence during the first two decades of the 20th century.
Famous for an attack that killed 36 British troops in 1913, the Mullah was also notorious for writing open letters to the British public, in which he would boast: “I like war, but you do not.”
A century later he is still remembered in Somalia as a classic Muslim resistance fighter, and during the US occupation of Mogadishu in 1993, which culminated in the Black Hawk Down massacre of US troops, resistance leaflets quoted verses from a mocking poem the Mullah wrote about a British commander he killed, called simply “The Death of Richard Corfield”.
It is no surprise that Godane, whose bombastic internet broadcasts are the modern-day equivalent, is understood to consider the Mullah a spiritual hero.
