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Mogadishu, Somalia (AHN) – Al Shabaab militants, the al Qaeda proxy in Somalia, have ordered Somali teachers and their school children to pay a monthly contribution to help finance the group’s combat operations against the United Nations-backed government and African Union peacekeepers in the capital.

During a meeting with school principals in the Elasha Biyaha neighborhood outside the capital on Friday, militants declared Somali students must pay one dollar and as well as every teacher must pay 10% of their salary at the end of every month.

“The holy war in Somalia will continue and every Somali must take part in the war that means if you cannot come to the battle zone you have to contribute money to the holly war,” senior al Shabaab leader Sheik Fu’ad Mohamed Qalaf told school principals.

A Somali school teacher who demanded anonymity because of security reasons told All Headlines News that the latest order from al Shabaab cannot be met because of the amount of money they are demanding.

“We live in a very poor situation because the monthly salary we take doesn’t even cover the whole needs of our families and most of the students we have don’t pay school fees because they include orphans and some from poorer families so how they can be able to pay one dollar per month,” the anonymous teacher told AHN on Saturday.

For the past several months al Shabaab have been suffering from economical problems and that is because most of the big companies whom they used to take money by force moved from the militant hotbed Bakaara market to the government controlled- side of the capital.

Last month, al Shabaab ordered business owners in the Elasha Biyaha neighborhood to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash as contribution to their ongoing conflict against the central government. Elasha Biyaha is home to more than 1.5 million people who fled from their homes in the capital Mogadishu.

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