Mogadishu: A leader of Somalia's Islamist insurgency threatened to attack America during a broadcast speech.

"We tell the American President Barack Obama to embrace Islam before we come to his country," Fouad Mohammad ‘Shongole' Qalaf said on Monday.

Al Shabab has not yet launched an attack outside Africa but Western intelligence has long been worried because the group targeted young Somali-Americans for recruitment.

Al Shabab holds most of southern and central Somalia and has the support of hundreds of foreign fighters, mostly radicalised East Africans. It seeks to overthrow the weak UN-backed government, which is protected by 8,000 Ugandan and Burundian African Union peacekeepers.

The Al Shabab militia launched coordinated suicide attacks in Uganda in July that killed 76 people. It has also announced its allegiance to Al Qaida and is believed to be harbouring a mastermind of the twin 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people.

Al Shabab's command

The radio message was recorded in the town of Afgoye, near the Somali capital, during a meeting of Shongole and Shaikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, formerly the leader of insurgent group Hizbul Islam. The two insurgent groups had clashed several times previously but announced a merger last week. Aweys said his group will fight under Al Shabab's command.

"We have united for the sake of our ideology and we are going to redouble our efforts to remove the government and the African Union from the country," said Aweys on Monday.

In an unrelated development, the Somali Information Minister Abdulkareem Jama said the new Cabinet had approved the use of a private security contractor to train forces in Mogadishu and the programme would start "soon".

Saracen International would train forces for VIP protection, Jama said.

The arid Horn of Africa nation has not had a functioning government since a socialist dictatorship collapsed in 1991. Its position on the Horn of Africa means pirates can use its long coastline to capture shipping.

Analysts fear that Al Qaida linked insurgents are also gaining ground across the Gulf of Aden in the unstable nation of Yemen.

If Yemen fell, that would mean failed states on either side of the shipping route leading into the strategically vital Suez Canal, the route taken by a substantial portion of the world's oil shipments.