Al Shabab, a Somali Islamist militant group, on Thursday threatened to attack Kenya if it proceeds with its plans to train some 10,000 troops of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of Somalia.
"Our Islamic religion orders us to fight and kill all infidels, so by obeying that we will attack Kenya if it doesn't stop helping Abdullahi Yusuf's secular government," the group's spokesman Sheikh Muktar Robow told reporters late on Wednesday.
The threat comes days after Kenyan Foreign Affairs Minister Moses Wetangula offered to train the TFG troops that are currently fighting the Islamist militants with help of the Ethiopian troops stationed in Somalia.
Earlier the hard-line Al Shabab group had rejected a peace deal signed between the Somali transitional government and the opposition Alliance for the Deliberation of Somalia (ARS) in neighboring Djibouti, saying that Ethiopian forces should be withdrawn from Somalia for beginning any peace process.
Somalia has not had a functioning government after the fall of the last government in 1991. Recently, the violence escalated after the country's weak transitional government ousted the Islamists from Mogadishu with Ethiopian help in December 2006.
Also, the 2400-strong AU peacekeeping force in Somalia has been struggling with their peacekeeping efforts in Somalia after the ousted Islamist fighters turned to guerrilla warfare against the government, Ethiopian and AU troops.
It is estimated the fighting between the Islamist insurgents and the army has killed thousands of Somalis and has displaced hundreds of thousands more, mostly from the capital Mogadishu.
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