Somali gunmen attacked an oil-tanker truck near Mogadishu on Thursday, wounding three people and raising fears of a return to the clan violence that had largely stopped during six months of Islamist rule.
The Somalia Islamic Courts Council (SICC), which had imposed strict sharia law across much of the south, abandoned the capital last week to government troops backed by heavily armed Ethiopian forces.
Within hours of their departure, militiamen loyal to various warlords who had been ousted in June reappeared at checkpoints in the city where they used to rob, rape and murder civilians.
”The militias fired three RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. One of them hit us,” the truck driver, who gave his name as Tusbah, told the media at the scene, where the charred wreckage of his vehicle lay strewn across a sandy road.
”They were bandits who wanted money.”
Dozens of passengers riding on top of the truck fled as the gunmen fired automatic rifles before launching grenades.
The rapid return of warlords showed how easily Mogadishu could slide back into the anarchy it has suffered since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991.
The attack in Galgalato, 25km north of the city centre, came on the last day of a three-day government ultimatum for Mogadishu residents and militias to hand in their guns.
But few have been turned in, as locals in one of the world’s most dangerous cities wait to see if the government can restore the relative stability experienced under the Islamists.
”I have an AK-47 [Kalashnikov rifle] and a pistol in my house. I will not surrender them because I don’t see any trustworthy person to give them to,” said one resident, who declined to be named.
”People have started burying their weapons. Others have transported their heavy weapons outside Mogadishu.”
Interior Minister Hussein Mohamed Farah Aideed said disarmament would take time.
”The three days should not be taken literally. It can even take years,” he told reporters. ”Disarming Somalis is not easy. The government will have a tough time collecting the arms, and specifically the small arms.”
Diplomatic push
Interim government troops, backed by Ethiopian armour and aircraft, were hunting Islamist fighters who fled their last stronghold in the southern port of Kismayo on Monday following a two-week war. The Islamists have vowed to fight on.
”Our troops went towards the Kenyan border to get those terrorists,” said Abdullahi Sheikh Ismail, a senior government security official in Kismayo.
The United States has deployed warships off the Somali coast to hunt fleeing Islamists and Nairobi has declared the long land frontier closed, leaving refugees from the fighting unable to seek refuge in Kenya’s north-eastern Dadaab camps, home to tens of thousands of Somalis.
”Potentially up to 7 000 people are sitting in Doble [a Somali border town],” said Geoff Wordley of the UN refugee agency in Dadaab.
”They have no assistance or food or water … This could develop into a major crisis.”
But Kenyan Foreign Minister Raphael Tuju denied that genuine refugees had been turned away, and said suspected fighters holding British, Canadian, Eritrean and Danish passports had been intercepted.
”It is apparent that some of these ‘asylum seekers’ are combatants on the run. Kenya will not allow combatants and their families to use this country as a base,” he said.
The Somali government wants a foreign peacekeeping force — approved by the United Nations before the war — to be deployed.
Uganda has provisionally offered a battalion, and its President, Yoweri Museveni, was due to meet his Ethiopian counterpart Meles Zenawi in Addis Ababa on Thursday. — Reuters