Helicopters pounded rebel positions and tanks rumbled through Mogadishu on Thursday as allied Ethiopian and Somali government troops launched a major push against insurgents, with 11 civilians reported killed.
Ethiopian helicopter gunships fired rockets, residents said, in the first use of aerial power in the capital during the increasingly vicious fighting of recent months.
”I have not seen anything like this,” said one terrified inhabitant, Hussein Haji. ”Whenever the Ethiopians fire their big guns, all my windows and doors are shaking.”
Breaking a rocky ceasefire in place since the weekend, the soldiers launched attacks from early morning on insurgents’ strongholds in the Ramadan area of north Mogadishu and around the main soccer stadium.
Islamists, ousted from Mogadishu by the Ethiopians and Somali government over the New Year, are blamed for an increasingly bloody insurgency in Mogadishu. Disgruntled clan militia have joined their cause, inhabitants say.
Explosions and gunfire rattled around the streets from soon after dawn, sending residents running for cover in their homes.
”Early in the morning, the government troops and Ethiopians attacked us at the Ramadan Hotel,” one Islamist source involved in the fighting told Reuters by telephone.
The local Shabelle broadcaster said at least 11 people, mainly civilians, had been killed by stray bullets on Thursday. It also reported two tanks had been destroyed.
”The Ethiopian forces, who are now facing strong resistance, continue to shell particular targets of the insurgents,” it added. ”Two helicopter gunships started bombardments in the rebel positions of the capital.”
Hospitals reported mass casualties.
”Patients are coming to us by the minute, it is too much,” one harried doctor at Madina hospital told Reuters by telephone. ”I cannot given you numbers now, we are too busy.”
Exoduc from Mogadishu
Reuters cameraman Farah Roble, who could not leave his Mogadishu office due to gunfire, said: ”We are seeing smoke from explosions. There are helicopters flying around. We haven’t seen that before.”
One resident, who identified himself as Mohamed, said a helicopter had opened fire on the Iveco area of south-central Mogadishu which is held by Islamist sympathisers.
The Ethiopians had brokered a truce at the weekend with the city’s dominant Hawiye clan after a week that saw at least two dozen people killed, soldiers’ bodies dragged in streets, and a plane crash probably due to a missile.
That fighting was the worst since the war over the New Year to kick out the Islamists and put President Abdullahi Yusuf’s interim government in the capital.
The government represents the 14th attempt at restoring central rule in the country since 1991.
The African Union has sent 1 200 troops to help pacify Somalia. But they have also been the target of attacks in the lawless Horn of Africa nation that defied a United Nations-United States peacekeeping mission in the early 1990s.
The United Nations said on Thursday that 57 000 people had fled Mogadishu since February, including 12 000 in the last week. ”They are hungry and face harassment from thugs,” the UN refugee agency said in a statement. – Reuters