Last September, Yahoo News' Kevin Sites interviewed Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys. As fate would have it, he's been named leader of the Islamic council that's taken control of Mogadishu, capital of the essentially ungoverned country of Somalia.

An excerpt:

The United States lists Al-Ittihad al-Islami (Islamic Council) as a foreign terrorist group and has frozen its assets within U.S. jurisdictions.

Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys is a leader of the group and was once a colonel in the Somali army. Aweys denies any al-Qaida connections, but does say he wants Somalia to become a theocracy.

"The only reason Western powers say that al-Qaida is in Somalia is because they are afraid that Somalia will become an Islamic state and they will do everything they can to stop that," Aweys says. "I believe there's not even one person in Somalia connected to al-Qaida. We are one clan, one color, one language. We would not accept foreigners (al-Qaida) here."

Aweys, with penetrating eyes and a red, henna-tipped beard, is deeply suspicious of Western journalists. I am just the second to interview him within his guarded compound in Mogadishu.

As I a set up my camera and tripod, he asks me if I am an American -- and a Jew. He looks at me askance, as if I were a spy, but consents to the interview anyway.

I ask him about the March 2005 United Nations report that claimed Somalia has become a haven for jihadists and has no fewer than 17 mobile terrorist training camps on its soil.

The FBI, people like you (journalists) and other groups who are often in the shadows always say al-Qaida is in Somalia," says Aweys, dismissively.

Interim President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed "also said two years ago there were al-Qaida training camps here. Well, the FBI came here, journalists came here and there were no training camps. It's just not true. We all know each other in Somalia. We would know if al-Qaida was here."

Aweys says he is, however, sympathetic to "jihads" being waged against Western forces around the world.

"If you lock a cat in a room all the time," Aweys says, "what do you think it will do? It's going to fight back."

He says he also supports Somalis who have gone to Iraq to fight against Americans there.

"Islam is one body; if you're wounded in one place, you feel it everywhere. We all feel it when Americans kill Muslims," says Aweys. "I know in my heart I cannot accept when they say we must stay outside. Western countries fight to take what they want from us. We won't accept those conditions."

Somalia is an interesting test case. Both Canada and the United States deployed forces to Somalia in the early 1990s. The country defined "failed state," having been in a state of near civil-war since 1977.

Canada's troops became embroiled in a scandal known as the Somalia Affair, which occurred in March 1993.

The Americans pulled out shortly after a fierce October 1993 battle immortalized in the book Black Hawk Down.

No time for a detailed treatise tonight, but Americans decided they didn't want to risk the lives of their troops in a nation-building exercise.

Osama bin Laden, head of the Islamist terror network al Qaeda, would later say that he was amazed the Americans could be pushed out of Somalia so easily.

And now, he has a sympathetic regime in charge of the nation's capital.

It might well be time for a detailed look back at how Somalia got to this point.