President of the Somali National Assembly and prominent Somali Youth League member. Osman Haji Mohamed – Prominent Somali Youth League member and parliamentarian. Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed – President of Somalia, Colonel in Somali National Army, and commander during WSLF campaign. Omar Osman Rabeh – Pan-Somalist that has written many works on Somali nationalism. Mohamed Ainanshe Guleid, Major General in the Somali National Army and Vice president of the Somali Democratic Republic Mohamed Farah Aidid – Prominent Somali military commander and political leader. A former general and diplomat, he was the chairman of the United Somali Congress (USC) and later led the Somali National Alliance (SNA). In 1992, Aidid attacked American troops in the nation. He was one of the main targets of the Unified Task Force. Eventually forcing United States forces to withdraw from Somalia in 1995. Religion With very few exceptions, Somalis are entirely Muslims, the majority belonging to the Sunni branch of Islam and the Shafi‘i school of Islamic jurisprudence. There are two theories about when Somalis began adopting Islam. One states that Islam probably arrived in Somalia in the 7th-century when followers of Muhammad came over to escape persecution from the Quraysh tribe in Mecca. An alternate theory states that Islam was brought to the coastal settlements of Somalia between the 7th and the 10th century by seafaring Arab and Persian merchants. The Sunni-Shia split within Islam occurred before Islam spread among Somalis, and Sunnis constitute the overwhelming majority of contemporary Somalis. Somali Sufi religious orders (tariqa) – the Qadiriyya, the Ahmadiya and the Salihiyya – in the form of Muslim brotherhoods have played a major role in Somali Islam and the modern era history of Somalia. Of the three orders, the less strict Qaadiriya tariqa is the oldest, and it is the sect to which most Somalis belong. The Qaadiriya order is named after Shaikh Muhiuddin Abdul Qadir Gilani of Baghdad. I. M. Lewis states that Qaadiriya has a high reputation for maintaining a higher standard of Islamic instruction than its rivals. Ahmadiyah and its sub-sect Salihiyyah preached a puritanical form of Islam, and have rejected the popular Sufi practice of tawassul (visiting the tombs of saints to ask mediation). B. G. Martin states that these two orders shared some of the views of the Wahhabis of Arabia. The religious differences between Qaadiriya and Salihiyya were controversial, as Salihis continued to oppose the Qadiris' practice of