A Somali military tribunal has sentenced six Moroccan ISIS fighters to death.
If the appeal, which must be filed within one month, is not successful, the men will be executed by firing squad.
“They came to Somalia to support the Islamic State (IS), to destroy and to shed blood,” the court’s vice president, Colonel Ali Ibrahim Osman, told VOA Somali.
The men’s lawyers said they had been tricked into joining IS and had asked to be deported to Morocco.
This is the first time authorities in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland have prosecuted or convicted a foreign national for joining Islamic State.
The military tribunal also sentenced an Ethiopian and a Somali to 10 years in prison each and released another Somali defendant due to lack of evidence.
The militants were captured in the Qal Miscat mountains, east of Bosaso, Puntland’s commercial capital.
These mountains are the stronghold of the Islamic State and are based there.
The Somali branch of ISIS was founded in 2015 by a group of defectors from al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabab, Somalia’s largest jihadist group.
According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the organization is notorious for extorting local populations and primarily conducts small-scale, sporadic attacks.
Terrorism-related crimes generally carry the death penalty in Somalia.
This practice was condemned by several local and international human rights organizations, including the Somali Union of Human Rights Defenders.
Last month, the coalition and other human rights groups said in a report that at least 55 people were executed in Somalia last year.
Twenty-three of the executions carried out last year were carried out by military authorities in Puntland and Somalia’s capital Mogadishu.