Exiled Somali governement to implement shariah law

"Moderate" Islamist President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed will implement shariah law. Apparently implelmenting shariah law is moderate. There's nothing moderate about stoning women to death for adultery, lashing people for drinking alcohol, killing those who leave islam, there is nothing moderate in that. Xinhuanet

MOGADISHU, March 3 (Xinhua) -- The Somali government, led by the moderate Islamist President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, has announced this week it would implement the Islamic Sharia law in the country after influential clerics and two major insurgent groups demanded it, but analysts said this may not be enough to appease the opposition Islamist groups bent on unseating the government.

Early in February, a group of prominent clerics met in the capital Mogadishu and issued several recommendations for the government including, among other things, the imposition of the Islamic Sharia law in Somalia and the withdrawal of African Union peacekeepers from the Horn of Africa country torn apart by nearly two decades of civil strife.

"We have not only issued these recommendations for the government but also met the President and asked him to implement Allah's Laws in the country which he accepted," Sheikh Ahmed Abdi Disow, deputy chairman of Somalia's Union of Islamic Scholars, told Xinhua.

The implementation of the Islamic Sharia law is one of the core demands of the armed Islamist groups in Somalia including even the current President's Islamic Courts Union which briefly ruled much of southern and central Somalia in the latter half of 2006 before the movement was driven by allied Ethiopian troops and former Somali government led by Abdulahi Yusuf Ahmed.