MOGADISHU, Somalia -- A renegade leader of Somalia's Islamic extremist insurgents, al-Shabab, has surrendered to the government.
Mukhtar Robow was flown to Mogadishu on Sunday from Hudur in southwestern Somalia, said Col. Adam Ahmed, a senior Somali police official. Robow was earlier airlifted from the Bakool jungle area where he and hundreds of his militia members have been fighting al-Shabab since early last week.
Robow had fallen out with the al-Shabab leadership, which has been carrying out a purge of its ranks. The action against al-Shabab officials was initiated by group leader Ahmed Abdi Godane, who started to kill his rivals. Among those killed was the rapping American Jihadist, Omar Hammami, as well as Ibrahim Afghani, one of the group's founders. Godane was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2014.
For the past several months, Robow had been on the run from his own group, setting up a base in Abal Village, in southwest Somalia. In the past few days, government officials had been trying to help him and his forces escape.
"We contacted him many times, and we understood each other," said Moalim Ahmed, the mayor of Hudur, a small town in the area where Robow operated.
Robow's defection came after the United States in June canceled a $5 million reward offered for his capture. His surrender is the culmination of months of negotiations and it is believed the cancellation of the bounty for his capture helped persuade Robow to give himself up to the Somalia government.
After Ethiopia invaded Somalia in December 2006, the Islamist group that briefly controlled Somalia went underground, and Robow with it, orchestrating hit-and-run attacks on Ethiopian forces and Somalia's weak government.
Insurgent fighters banded together under the name al-Shabab, which was one of the Islamist factions in Somalia at the time. Robow became an al-Shabab spokesman and a top field commander; at one time he was thought to be the No. 2 or No. 3 in the organization.
"We don't have a problem with Americans," he said during a visit by a reporter to Somalia in the fall of 2006.
"Look at you. You're here, we've been protecting you all week -- maybe you didn't even know it," he said then. "We want peace; we crave it more than you could ever understand, to get out of this darkness, to stop killing each other, to stop being the laughingstock of the world."
It's not clear if Robow will be given a position in the Somali government or placed under house arrest or possibly even put on trial. He had not been an active militant for several years, though he still commanded a sizable force of loyal young gunmen who were in his clan.
Somali officials indicated Sunday that they had not decided what to do with him.
Information for this article was contributed by Abdi Guled of The Associated Press and by Hussein Mohamed, Jeffrey Gettleman and Mohamed Ibrahim of The New York Times.
A Section on 08/14/2017