Ethiopian troops will stay in Somalia for another few weeks to help the victorious government pacify the Horn of Africa nation after a two-week war to oust militant Islamists, Addis Ababa said on Tuesday.
Tightening the net on defeated Somali Islamic Courts Council (Sicc) fighters fleeing south, neighbouring Kenya said it had sealed its long and porous north-eastern border.
A triumphant Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, whose intervention turned the war against the Islamists, said his forces would only remain ”for a few weeks” while the interim government pacifies the chaotic nation.
”It is up to the international community to deploy a peacekeeping force in Somali without delay to avoid a vacuum and the resurgence of extremists and terrorists,” he added.
Uganda has offered a battalion, while the Somali government says Nigeria may also give troops to an African peacekeeping mission already endorsed by the United Nations before the war.
Ethiopian planes, tanks and troops helped the Somali government drive out the Islamists from Mogadishu last week. The administration broke out of its provincial outpost to end six months of Islamist rule across much of the south.
In Mogadishu — where the interim government set up gun collection points at the start of a drive to disarm one of the world’s most dangerous cities — Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi also said Ethiopian troops would stay a while.
”The Ethiopians will leave when they clear terrorists and pacify Somalia. It will be … weeks and months,” he said.
Despite the Islamists’ surprisingly quick flight, analysts and diplomats say the conflict may be far from over.
The Islamists, joined by some foreign fighters, may launch an Iraqi-style insurgency against a government they see as propped up by a hated and Christian-led foreign power.
Gedi said Eritrean, Ethiopian rebel and Arab fighters had been taken prisoner during the fighting. ”This is a clear sign foreign fighters are involved,” he said.
The government has offered an amnesty to Somali fighters, but says foreigners will face the courts.
‘No sacred cows’
The government has told Mogadishu residents to hand over their weapons by Thursday or be forcibly disarmed. ”There will be no sacred cows,” Information Minister Ali Jama Jangali said.
Gedi said many had already flocked to the collection points, but at one seen by Reuters, not a single gun had been handed in.
Stabilising the city is the first priority of the interim government whose legitimacy hinges on installing itself in the capital and restoring central rule for the first time since the 1991 overthrow of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
The task is complicated by the return of warlords hoping to restore fiefdoms they ran before the Sicc, which pacified Mogadishu by enforcing sharia, Islamic law, chased them out.
Despite a UN arms embargo, a proliferation of weapons has made the war-scarred capital on the Indian Ocean one of the most gun-infested cities in the world.
Sicc spokesperson Abdirahim Ali Mudey, speaking from a hideout, poured scorn on the government’s disarmament drive, saying it would be unable to unite Somalia’s clan-based society.
”Some clans will fight back because trust does not yet exist,” Mudey said by telephone, without revealing his location.
After fleeing their last stronghold in the southern port of Kismayu on Monday in the face of an Ethiopian bombardment, Islamist fighters and leaders have moved further south.
”Anyone who hands in his weapon will be forgiven,” Somalia’s defence minister, Colonel Abdikadir Adan Shire, also known as Barre Hiraale, told a huge victory rally in Kismayu on Tuesday.
South of Kismayu, where the Islamists are on the run, Nairobi said it was trying to stop hundreds crossing through.
”The border with Somalia has been closed and some have been prevented from entering into our side. In fact about 100 people have been sent back,” Ananiah Mwaboza, Kenya’s assistant minister for immigration, told Reuters.
Kenyan police were questioning eight suspected Islamist fighters who had crossed the border.
”The national security of Kenya is at stake, the Islamists could bring their war into Kenya,” immigration officer Chese Ruto said from Liboi police station on the border.
Residents say some Islamist fighters have re-grouped in the hilly Buur Gaabo region, just on the Somali side of the border.
Somali Interior Minister Hussein Mohamed Farah Aideed — son of a warlord who fought US troops when they intervened disastrously in the early 1990s — said Sicc leaders were in the coastal village of Ras Kamboni.
Warships from the Djibouti-based US counterterrorism Joint Task Force were patrolling the sea off Somalia to stop Sicc leaders or foreign militant supporters escaping, diplomats said. – Reuters