Citizen G'kar: Musings on Earth

April 02, 2007

Somalia Returns To Chaos

The US backed Ethiopian incursion into Somalia has bogged down into an urban street fight. Civilians are again caught in the crossfire, recruiting more for the ICC side of the conflict.
This little adventure is symptomatic of the Bush Administration weak foreign policy. If you don't like a someone vying for power, create the opposition. If that doesn't work, shoot him.
Al Qaeda is now recruiting for this war as well. The Somali Government claimed that al-Qaeda had named an Islamist commander, Aden Hashi Ayro, as its leader in Mogadishu.
Al Jazeera
On Thursday, Ethiopian troops backed by tanks and helicopters launched the assault to crush armed groups opposing Somalia's weak interim government in Mogadishu.


The armed groups, made up of the remnants of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) movement that was pushed out of the city last year as well as a number of clan militias fighting alongside them, have fired mortars from inside residential areas.


Ethiopian troops have used heavy artillery to shell the fighters' positions inside those areas. However, civilians caught in the crossfire have been the main victims. Hospitals have been overwhelmed, but most victims have been unable to seek any kind of help because of the ongoing clashes. Doctors were also trapped in their homes by the violence and thousands of people have fled Mogadishu in recent days. Corpses remain on the streets as ongoing fighting and mortar fire made it difficult to retrieve bodies or tally the dead.


An AFP news agency correspondent on Sunday said he saw the bodies of at least six civilians lying in the street. Residents said hundreds were believed to have been killed across the city of one million people.

New York Times
The chaos in Somalia took an ugly turn on Wednesday when full-scale fighting broke out in Mogadishu and furious crowds mutilated the bodies of government soldiers, chanting, “We will burn you alive!”


The scene was reminiscent of 1993, when Somalis turned on American peacekeepers and dragged their bodies through the streets. Those images and the loss of 18 American soldiers in a single battle, the infamous “Black Hawk Down” episode, led to a swift American withdrawal.


This time the targets were Ethiopian troops and the soldiers of Somalia’s transitional government, both reviled by many people in Mogadishu, Somalia’s chaotic capital. Residents are now beginning to fear that this transitional government is headed in the same direction as the 13 transitional governments that came before it — into a vortex of clan violence and anarchy that has made Somalia an icon of a failed state.


The recent injection of a small force of African Union peacekeepers does not seem to have made a difference.


At dawn on Wednesday, Ethiopian and government soldiers stormed into a neighborhood in southern Mogadishu to disarm gunmen there. Instead, witnesses said, they were greeted by dozens of masked insurgents who blasted them with rocket-propelled grenades.


More than 15 people were killed, including several government soldiers and possibly two Ethiopians.


The neighborhood is home to several clans that feel alienated by the transitional government and was a stronghold of the Islamist movement that took over the city and much of south-central Somalia last year, before being defeated by Ethiopian and government soldiers in December.

TimesOnline
Al-Qaeda has named a militant Islamist commander - trained in Afghanistan and known for his ruthlessness - as its key representative in Mogadishu, as clashes between government troops and insurgents broke out in the Somali capital for the second day.


In this morning’s exchanges, which took place in both northern and southern parts of the city, insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and heavy machine-guns as government troops responded with a barrage of artillery and machine-gun fire, according to witnesses.
No casualties were yet reported, but terrified residents - unwittingly caught up in the exchanges - rushed to make their way out of Mogadishu amid fears that the latest bloodshed would spread.


Today’s events came a day after fierce fighting between government forces and insurgents killed at least 14 people, including soldiers whose bodies were dragged though the streets and set on fire.


The violence – some of the worst in the Somali capital since last year’s ousting of Islamists – led Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi to urge civilians to leave areas in southern Mogadishu “for security reasons”.

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