Hundreds of Ethiopian soldiers moved into the temporary seat of Somalia’s weak government on Monday to protect the administration from feared attacks by powerful Islamists, witnesses said.
Between 300 and 400 uniformed Ethiopian soldiers in heavy trucks rolled into Baidoa after Islamist forces seized a key southern port overnight, further threatening the transitional government’s limited authority, they said.
”We saw the trucks and the number of the forces could be 300 to 400,” said Baidoa resident Mohamed Hassan, one of several witnesses to the deployment who spoke to Agence France-Presse.
”The Ethiopians have arrived, they were in dozens of trucks,” said another.
In Mogadishu, the defence chief of the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS) told reporters that at least 300 Ethiopian soldiers had arrived on Monday in Baidoa.
”We have solid reports about the Ethiopian troops in Baidoa from our intelligence department,” said Yusuf Mohamed Siad. ”They are accompanied by heavy war machinery. This an act of aggression.” he added.
Both Ethiopia and the Somali government have in the past denied numerous eyewitness accounts of Ethiopian troops on Somali soil.
But Addis Ababa has pledged to defend the government from any threat by the Islamists who took control of Mogadishu in June after months of fighting and have rapidly expanded their territory to include much of southern Somalia.
Despite an interim peace accord, tensions between the government and the Islamists are high and the two sides are at fierce odds of the proposed deployment of foreign peacekeepers to support the administration.
Overnight, Muslim forces rolled into the key southern port of Kismayo, from where they plan to fight the arrival of any peacekeeping mission as well as seal Somalia’s border with Kenya to prevent an overland deployment.
Somalia has been without a functioning central authority for the past 16 years and the government in Baidoa, the latest in more than a dozen international attempts to restore stability, has been unable to assert control. — AFP
