Sheikh Mukhtar Robow

Sheikh Mukhtar Robow Ali (also known as Abu Mansour ) (* in the 1960s in Bardale District, Bay Area, South Somalia) is considered a representative of radical Islamism in Somalia. He was senior member of the Union of Islamic Courts and is now leader of the al - Shabaab militia.

Life

Mukhtar Robow is a member of Leysan - sub-clans of the Rahanweyn. He studied at the local Islamic school and later at the mosque in Mogadishu. In the 1990s he studied Islamic law at the University of Khartoum in Sudan. Back in Mogadishu, he worked for the Al- Haramein Saudi Foundation, which was later accused by the United States to be associated with Islamist terrorists. Mukhtar Robow to have fought in Afghanistan on the Taliban side.

In Somalia, he was senior member of the Union of Islamic Courts, which took control of large parts of the country in 2006. As a representative of the extremist wing within the Union, he cried out in the fall of 2006 in Mogadishu on a holy war against Ethiopia. But most of the Ethiopian invasion, he made rather a pilgrimage to Mecca. In 2008 he became leader of the Islamist youth militia al -Shabaab, after his predecessor Aden Hashi Ayro had been killed in a U.S. raid.