TO SOMALIS he is the “Old Fox”, a former army colonel with a red, henna-stained beard whose tactical brilliance delivered Mogadishu to his Islamic militias within weeks. To America he is a terrorist, the former leader of an East African cell with connections to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

Now Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys says that he wants to be a man of peace. In a rare interview, the hardline leader of the Somalian Islamic courts says that he is ready to work with the fragile interim Government before peace talks due to resume in Khartoum at the weekend. “Legally the Government is still the Government, but we are the power in Somalia,” he says over cinnamon-spiced tea in a whitewashed Mogadishu villa. “In order for the Government to fulfil its role, and for us to continue doing what we want to do and to provide leadership to our people, we need to come together.”

It is an unusual statement of reconciliation from an Islamic leader who promotes holy war against the West. Outside, militiamen lounge in the back of a four-wheel-drive vehicle armed with a heavy-calibre machinegun.

Rival warlords carved this country into a series of personal fiefdoms after the collapse of Mohamed Siad Barre’s brutal regime in 1991. That changed in June, when militias allied to a network of Sharia courts defeated a US-backed alliance of warlords in Mogadishu. Since then the Islamic courts have strengthened their hold on the city and fanned out around the country. Their triumph shocked regional capitals, which fear an Islamic fundamentalist government on their doorsteps, and Western governments, who believe that Somalia could become a haven for al-Qaeda in the same way as Taleban-governed Afghanistan. Bin Laden has taken an interest in Somalia. In an audio recording broadcast in July, he urged the Mujahidin in Somalia to fight anyone who might weaken their grip on power.

America believes that members of an al-Qaeda cell behind the 1998 bombing of its Nairobi Embassy remain in the country, butSheikh Aweys dismisses such allegations angrily. “America knows that al-Qaeda is not in Somalia,” he says. “Their fear is simply that they do not like to have an Islamic government here.”

It is an allegation that Sheikh Aweys is likely to face again and again. The Old Fox led al-Ittihad al-Islamiya, an Islamist militia accused of links with al-Qaeda, during the 1990s. Today he would rather ignore questions about his links with Bin Laden than condemn suicide bombers who take jihad to America.

Al-Ittihad was eventually defeated after a series of battles with Ethiopian forces and with Abdullahi Yusuf, then the leader of the semi-autonomous region of Puntland and now the transitional President of Somalia. Sheikh Aweys then became a leading player in the Sharia courts that emerged gradually in Mogadishu. They were designed to restore law and order to a city kept in a permanent state of chaos by its warlord masters.

Sheikh Aweys is credited with providing the tactical nous for the courts’ speedy victory. He remained in the shadows as Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, the moderate chairman of the Islamic Courts’ Union, became the public face of the movement, but at the end of June he was named chairman of the courts’ consultative council, suggesting a lurch towards a more radical form of Islam.

“Aweys is the danger man,” a Western diplomatic source in Nairobi said. “He is the guy with the strategy and the ability to turn the courts into something nasty.”

For now, the courts have been warmly welcomed by Mogadishu residents tired of war. Although they have imposed brutal punishments — sentencing rapists to death by stoning and ordering drug users to be lashed — residents say that they can now walk freely around the city for the first time in years. The international airport has reopened and ships have begun arriving at the port.

But heavy rains this week have exposed the scale of the task. One brick building collapsed and dozens of shacks were washed away, leaving hundreds of people homeless.

TOUGH JUSTICE

The United States fears that the courts have links to al-Qaeda — an allegation that they vehemently deny

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