Sunday, May 28, 2006
MOGADISHU (AFP) – Relative calm returned to the war-torn Somali capital after a day of fierce battles between rival fighters allied to Islamic courts and a US-backed warlord alliance left dozens dead and scores wounded, witnesses said.
But sporadic gunfire could still be heard in two Mogadishu districts where fighting was most intense Saturday and which continued overnight to claim seven lives and injure 14 others.
Witnesses said five bodies were recovered in Daynile neighbourhood south of Mogadishu, but could not say whether they were militia or civilians and that 11 others had been injured.
“We have seen the bodies of five people who were killed, but later collected by the Islamic court militia. I cannot confirm whether the bodies are of milita from the Islamic court or if they were civilians,” Daynile resident Abdullahi Mohamed said.
Earlier, doctors at the capital’s Ayan hospital said that two people had been killed and three wounded in the deadly overnight fighting.
Battles resumed Saturday following a brief calm after two days of violence that worsened on Thursday, breaking a week-long lull and bringing the latest death toll to at least 62 killed and around 202 wounded.
The rival fighters of the Islamic courts and the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT) have defied repeated calls for calm since the intermittent fighting flared in February.
The ARPTC, which was set up in February with US backing, is fighting to curb the growing influence of Islamic courts and track down extremists, including Al-Qaeda members, that the courts are allegedly harbouring.
But the increasingly powerful and influential courts have also declared a holy war against the alliance — which they say is financed by the “enemy of Islam” — and deny the accusations.
Housing and Public Works Minister Osman Hassan Ali Atto, also a warlord controling parts of southern Mogadishu, added his voice to the repeated calls for a ceasefire.
“Let us talk and negotiate,” Atto said. “Guns have been unable to resolve our crisis in the past 15 years.”
He said that he had held talks with officials of the Islamic courts and was to hold similar talks with members of the ARPTC to seek a ceasefire to the violence that has thus far claimed nearly 300 lives in the deadliest violence Mogadishu has seen since Somalia collapsed into anarchy in 1991.
Somalia’s largely powerless transitional government, based in Baidoa about 250 kilometres (155 miles) northwest of Mogadishu, has blamed both the alliance and the United States for the fighting.
Washington says it is being “wrongly blamed”, although it has refused to confirm or deny its support for the ARPCT.
The Horn of Africa nation of some 10 million has been without a functioning central authority since the 1991 fall of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre plunged it into anarchy, with warlords battling for control of a patchwork of fiefdoms.
Source: AFP, May 28, 2996
