At least one person was killed and another wounded on Tuesday when suspected Islamic gunmen attacked a compound held by a United States-backed warlord alliance outside the lawless Somali capital, Mogadishu, witnesses said.
”It was difficult to know the identity of the attacker or attackers,” a commander in the compound told Agence France-Presse on condition of anonymity. ”They opened fire on the camp and we are now investigating.”
The attack shattered a brief but tense lull in the bloodiest fighting that Mogadishu has seen in 15 years. It raised fears that an unofficial truce observed by the two sides since Sunday could collapse, they said.
The pre-dawn raid targeted a compound 20km north of the city, belonging to warlord Mohamed Omar Habeb Dheere, a member of the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT), they said.
Dheere was not present at the time of the attack, according to the commander in the compound. He said the warlord was in his hometown of Jowhar, some 90km north of Mogadishu.
He had set up the compound in March during the last round of serious fighting between the ARPCT and gunmen loyal to Mogadishu’s 11 Islamic courts. The warlords claim the courts are harbouring foreign fighters and Muslim extremists, including al-Qaeda members.
But fighters based at the compound did not participate in the clashes that erupted last week in Mogadishu’s northern Sisi neighbourhood, in which at least 130 people were killed in eight days of rampant violence.
In Mogadishu, columns of heavily armed fighters patrolled Sisi on Tuesday as the two sides regrouped amid fears of new battles, residents said.
”They are setting up permanent positions, putting sandbags around their posts on the frontline,” Sisi resident Ahmed Sheikh Adan told AFP. ”They seem to be preparing themselves for another round of violence.”
An elderly man among a group of mediators trying to cement the tenuous truce was shot and wounded late on Monday while crossing the street that divides Sisi into sectors controlled by the Islamists and the warlords, witnesses said.
Both sides denied responsibility for the shooting which ”shows bluntly how precarious security situation is in the area”, a colleague of the injured man said.
Meanwhile, hundreds of war-weary Mogadishu residents, many of them women and children, took part in an overnight anti-war demonstration in the city’s southern Hodan district, residents said.
Hospital sources estimated that at least 130 people had been killed in the fighting and more than 300 wounded, although there are still widely divergent accounts of the death toll.
The warlord’s alliance, formed in February with US backing, has vowed to curb the influence of the courts. The latter have won support by restoring some stability to areas in Mogadishu they control.
In Cairo, Somali health minister Abdel Aziz Sheikh Yussuf blamed Washington for fuelling the clashes by supporting the warlords.
”The US is behind [the latest violence] through its financial and military support of warlords and its interference in the country’s internal affairs,” he said.
Although Washington has not confirmed its support for the alliance, US officials have told AFP the warlords have received US money. They have said the alliance is one of several it is working with to contain what the US sees as the threat of Islamic radicalism in the country.
Somalia, a nation of 10-million people in the Horn of Africa, has been without a functioning central authority since the fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 plunged it into anarchy. Since then warlords have been battling for control of a patchwork of fiefdoms.
More than a dozen attempts to restore stability have failed. The latest, a transitional government set up in 2004 in Kenya and now based in the town of Baidoa, west of Mogadishu, has been undermined by infighting and proved unable to assert control. — AFP
