By Mohamed Ali Bile
MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Rival militias observed a truce on Sunday demanded by clan elders alarmed that eight days of fighting, which has already killed 148 people, seemed ready to engulf Somalia’s main city Mogadishu.
But at least four civilians were killed before the shooting between gunmen from a powerful alliance of Mogadishu warlords and militiamen backed by the city’s influential Islamic courts stopped.
“I can only hear light firing. They have stopped the heavy shellings this morning,” resident Farhan Gure told Reuters by telephone. “People fear fighting will start outside the town.”
In a message broadcast by radio, the elders demanded a halt to the shooting and said that if either side broke the truce, they would support the other.
Both sides have massed fighters along the major roads in and out of the coastal capital, and reinforcements kept rolling in to join what is fast becoming an all-or-nothing war for control of the city.
“There is no fighting now. Elders have intervened. But there is no question fighting will resume on these roads,” Ali Nur, a militia leader with the warlord coalition, told Reuters by telephone.
Earlier fighting had been confined to northern shanty towns, but by Saturday had spread across the south of the city and the warlords moved to block key routes around Mogadishu.
Most of the 148 killed in eight days of fighting and the hundreds wounded have been civilians.
Analysts view the fighting in the failed Horn of Africa state as a proxy battle between al Qaeda and Washington, widely believed to be funding the warlords. This is the third and by far fiercest of fights the two sides have waged since February.
TERRORIST HIDEOUT
But there are political and commercial elements behind the battles as well. Both the warlords and the businessmen backing the Islamists want control of lucrative ports, airfields and road checkpoints where militiamen collect tolls at gunpoint.
Somalia’s interim government, the 14th try at imposing central authority on the country since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991, cannot yet move to Mogadishu because it has no control over the thousands of gunmen there.
President Abdullahi Yusuf and his administration on Saturday called for foreign intervention to stop the fighting, echoing a request he made for foreign peacekeepers to pacify the country shortly after taking office in late 2004.
That infuriated the Mogadishu warlords in his cabinet who were reluctant to give up their fiefdoms, widening a rift that all but paralysed the government for a year.
The Islamic courts, which have imposed order on parts of the anarchic city through traditional Islamic law, also oppose any threat to their authority — which the government will pose if it can ever move to the capital.
Right now, it is based in the southern city of Baidoa.
Yusuf and Islamic leaders have accused Washington of backing the warlords, who have called themselves the “Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism” in what some say is a cynical ploy to get U.S. cash.
The United States, which considers Somalia a likely terrorist hideout, has never directly answered the allegations, but has made clear it will work with anyone it considers an ally in fighting terrorism.
Source: Reuters, May 14, 2006
