Mogadishu's unfamiliar calm

The report gives further details of roadblocks mounted by the courts to extort money. One is described as collecting more than $350,000 per year from donkey carts and trucks.

The result is a military machine that has emerged as a real threat to the transitional government, says the report.

The US State Department has long feared that Somalia – with no central security apparatus and where visitors don't even need a visa – could become a safe haven for Al Qaeda.

David Shinn, adjunct professor at Georgetown University and former ambassador to Ethiopia, says the US was right to be concerned about Al Qaeda, but that these Islamists may not seek to harbor anti-Western terrorists.

"My guess is that the vast majority of people in [the US government] are very concerned about the sharia courts in a very negative way, probably excessively so, as there is a tendency to take all Islamic groups as hostile to US interests," he said by telephone from Washington.

Suleiman Baldo, Africa program director at the International Crisis Group, says the moderate Islamists have been weakened, and the radicals emboldened, by the allegations of US support for warlords.

Who will emerge the stronger, he added, remains to be seen.

"We will have to see what happens, but my expectation is that in order for the courts to consolidate their position, they will want to compromise and to be inclusive rather than pursue the path of radicalization," he says.

Among the more hard-line elements of the courts is Sheikh Mohamed Siyad. "We are Muslims and must work at implementing Koranic law – democracy will not work," he says.

Islamist leaders entered talks with the transitional government last week. But hopes of a deal were dashed at the weekend as the Islamists broke off contact in protest at government plans to invite international peacekeepers into Somalia.

It leaves a transitional government in control of little more than a town, while the Islamists have the capital and a large and growing swath of Somalia.

Meanwhile, the US has set up what it calls a Somalia Contact Group to devise strategy. Its first meeting is in New York Thursday, and it is seen by many as a tacit admission that its previous policy of supporting the warlords was not working.

None of this seems to matter to the residents of Mogadishu, who have been able to move freely around the city for the first time in years. For many here that is enough to suggest the Islamists are the good guys.

"We don't believe they are like the Taliban," says Ahmed Mohamed Wasuge, who owns a hardware shop. "At the moment the sharia courts are working for us and have brought peace and security, which all the communities of Mogadishu welcome."

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