Heavily armed gunmen fought pitched battles in the streets of the lawless Somali capital on Thursday, rocking the city with a fresh surge in the deadliest violence it has seen in years.
Islamic militia and fighters loyal to a United States-backed warlord alliance pounded southern and northern Mogadishu with heavy machine gun, rocket, artillery and mortar fire, sending the death toll soaring and hundreds fleeing for safety.
At least 20 people were killed and 55 wounded in four residential districts where the fighting was most intense, according witnesses and hospital sources who stressed that the death toll could be far higher.
”We have heard of many deaths in many parts of Mogadishu but we can’t confirm any toll,” a medical officer told Agence France-Presse at the city’s main Keysaney hospital, where three injured people had succumbed to their wounds by midday.
Another five people died at the Medina Hospital, Mogadishu’s second largest, sources there said.
Earlier, at least eight civilians were killed and 29 wounded in the southern K4 neighbourhood, while at least four were killed and four wounded in the northern Sisi neighbourhood, witnesses said.
Fierce clashes also erupted in the southern Daynile and northern Galgalato districts and there were fears the fighting would spread to other areas of the already bullet-scarred city as the two sides erected new roadblocks.
”In Daynile, they are shelling each other’s territory and around five people have been wounded,” resident Mohamed Hassan Liban told AFP.
In Galgalato, resident Mohamed Roble said it was impossible to estimate casualty figures because the fighting was preventing people from collecting the dead and wounded.
Elders desperately tried to contact commanders from the factions to secure a ceasefire, but neither side appeared willing to relent and desperate residents sought shelter from indiscriminate shelling.
”Mogadishu is a ghost city that should be abandoned, people cannot live here in a civilised manner,” said Khadija Mohamud (50), who was leaving her home in the Medina enclave of south Mogadishu.
”We are fed up with this fleeing, this is the third time in a month I have been forced to leave,” said Nur Daud, a carpenter, blaming both sides for using excessive firepower that has claimed lives and property.
Thursday’s battles erupted after a tense week-long lull in fighting that began in Sisi on May 7, killing more than 140 people over eight days before the two sides began observing a tenuous ceasefire.
Those clashes, the third major battle between the Islamists and the warlords since February, brought the death toll to more than 220 in the deadliest violence Mogadishu has seen since Somalia collapsed into chaos in 1991.
The fighting pits the Islamists against the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT), which was set up in February with US backing to curb the growing influence of Islamic courts and track down extremists, including al-Qaeda members that they are allegedly harbouring.
The courts, which have declared a holy war against the alliance that they say is financed by the ”enemy of Islam”, deny the accusations.
Somalia’s largely powerless transitional government, based in Baidoa, about 250km north-west of Mogadishu, has blamed both the alliance and the US for the fighting.
The US has said it is being ”wrongly blamed” for the fighting, although it has refused to confirm or deny its support for the ARPCT.
But US officials and informed Somali sources have told AFP that Washington has given money to the ARPCT, which is one of several groups it is working with to curb what it says is a growing threat from radical Islamists in Somalia.
The Horn of Africa nation of about 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.
More than a dozen attempts to restore stability have failed, and the current government has been racked by infighting and is unable to assert control. — AFP
