Angry crowds burned the bodies of two dead soldiers in Mogadishu on Wednesday, where fighting claimed some 14 lives, while the Somali Islamist leader defended the capital’s bloody insurgency.
Exchanges of heavy weapons fire across southern Mogadishu killed six uniformed soldiers and eight civilians, after insurgents attacked a former Defence Ministry headquarters housing Ethiopian troops backing the Somali government.
Residents burned the bodies of two soldiers and dragged another through the streets, in a grim echo of the treatment meted out to United States troops in a failed, United Nations-backed peace operation in Somalia in the early 1990s.
Hundreds of angry civilians celebrated in the Baruwa neighbourhood as they set the corpses of the two soldiers ablaze, shouting: ”You and Ethiopians will die”, ”Down, down with Somali troops” and ”We will burn you alive”.
Nearby, a woman carrying a machete shouted obscenities against Ethiopian and Somali troops while stepping on the body of another dead soldier being dragged by a rope tied to his foot, an Agence France-Presse (AFP) correspondent said. It was unclear if the soldiers were Somali or Ethiopian.
Meanwhile, the leader of Somalia’s Islamist movement, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, defended the insurgency.
His powerful Islamic Courts Union was ousted from much of south and central Somalia, including Mogadishu, in January by joint Somali-Ethiopian forces, but his supporters have since vowed to wage guerrilla attacks.
”If all foreign troops leave Somalia, we will settle our differences and everybody knows that,” Aweys told the BBC Somali service.
”The people who are fighting in Mogadishu are defending themselves and nobody will question that right,” he said from an undisclosed location in Somalia.
Ethiopia has denied that its troops were killed in the fighting.
”We are against any sort of speculation that Ethiopian troops were killed today [Wednesday] in Mogadishu,” said Fisseha Shawel, the Ethiopian embassy’s charge d’affaires in Mogadishu.
Civilians were caught in the stray gunfire and shelling after Ethiopian and Somali government troops responded to the morning attack, according to witnesses and an AFP correspondent.
Residents in various neighbourhoods of southern Mogadishu reported that 11 people had died, including three other soldiers.
”We have so far received more than 60 wounded people. We are in a very difficult situation,” said Dahir Dheere, the head administrator of the capital’s largest Medina hospital.
The US, which backed Ethiopian forces during the war with the Islamists, condemned the violence. ”It is a horrendous act. We condemn that in the strongest terms,” US ambassador to Kenya Michael E Ranneberger said of the bodies being burned, at a press briefing in Nairobi.
The Somali ambassador to Kenya, Mohamed Ali Nur, said Wednesday’s fighting was sparked by a government crackdown on suspected Islamist insurgents.
A planned 8 000-strong African Union force is trying to help Somali government troops regain control, but a spokesperson for the 1 500 Ugandan AU troops already deployed said that they had not been involved in Wednesday’s violence.
Meanwhile, media watchdog Reporters sans Frontièeres on Wednesday
called on the Somali interim government to respect press freedom after it reported that a Somali reporter from Radio Shabelle and his driver were arrested and beaten up.
It called for their release in a statement and condemned ”the mistreatment of journalists who were just doing their job”.
The AU mission is the first international peacekeeping venture since US troops led the ill-fated UN peace operation more than 10 years ago.
Factional bloodletting has wracked Somalia since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, creating a platform for a civil war that has defied more than 14 peace-making attempts.
Despite the violence, Nur said Somali’s two-year-old government had on Tuesday officially completed a move from the south-central town of Baidoa to Mogadishu. — Sapa-AFP