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Somalia: Five civilians killed as Islamist insurgents attack Somali forces in Mogadishu
Fri. June 13, 2008 01:16 am.- By Bonny Apunyu. -
(SomaliNet) In what sparked fierce clashes that killed at least five civilians, Islamist insurgents attacked Somali forces in Mogadishu on Thursday, witnesses said.
According to witnesses, rival sides pounded each other with machine guns, rocket propelled grenades and mortars after insurgents ambushed forces patrolling a road near the presidential palace.
"The fighting is very heavy in a way we have never experienced in recent months. I have seen three civilians killed, " said Mohamed Younis Ali, a resident of Taleh district.
Warsame Hussein saw two civilian bodies killed by a mortar shell in front of his house in the nearby Waberi area, bringing the toll to five.
Several witnesses said the clashes spread to other areas in southern Mogadishu, one of the most volatile zones in the capital wracked by 17 years of civil unrest.
An African Union peacekeeper told AFP that three mortar shells exploded at the Mogadishu airport as President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed's plane was preparing to take off.
"As the president was leaving, three mortar shells landed inside the airport, but nobody was injured," said the peacekeeper who requested anonymity.
A Somali government source said Yusuf was headed to Addis Ababa. Ethiopian forces are in Somalia backing the government campaign against the insurgents.
On June 1, three shells struck the airport and one exploded near Yusuf's plane just after he boarded it and was preparing to take off for Djibouti.
Ethiopian forces came to the rescue of Somalia's transitional government in late 2006 and defeated an Islamist militia that controlled southern and central regions where they had imposed Sharia law.
The militia has since waged a guerrilla warfare against government forces, its Ethiopian allies and African Union peacekeepers, mainly in Mogadishu.
Meanwhile, on Monday, Somali Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein and Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS) chief Sheikh Sharif Ahmed signed agreements at UN-sponsored talks in Djibouti, including a three-month truce which is to come into force within a month.
Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, an influential Islamic cleric, has rejected the deal. The sheikh, accused of links to Al-Qaeda by Washington, argued it failed to set a clear deadline for the withdrawal from Somalia of Ethiopian troops.
Numerous similar accords have been violated since 1991 when an uprising ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, transforming the nation into an ungovernable sprawl of fiefdoms.
The AU has deployed some 2,600 peacekeepers in Somalia -- short of the pledged 8,000 troops and they have failed to stem violence which rights groups say has killed 6,000 civilians over the past year.
According to the Somali truce, Ethiopian forces will withdraw after the UN deploys peacekeepers. The UN Security Council is considering a peacekeeping force but no concrete decision has been made yet.
The world body's appetite for Somali peacekeeping operations faded after a joint UN-US peace-enforcement mission ended disastrously in the 1990s with the death of many peacekeepers and US special forces. -AFP
News Category: Somalia
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