Renewed violence between Ethiopian troops and Somali insurgents killed at least five people in Mogadishu, residents said on Wednesday.
Heavy shelling rocked the southern area of the seaside capital on Tuesday night, and some mortars fell close to the presidential palace.
”I saw three dead bodies being pulled out of a shelled house,” Abdirahman Bile, a resident of Towfiq neighbourhood, told Reuters.
A local reporter said one other person had been killed in the Bakarah market and another in the Karaan district in the north of Mogadishu.
A spokesperson for the city’s dominant Hawiye clan said a ceasefire between the insurgents and Ethiopian troops helping the transitional government control the anarchic city was still in place.
”Until the forces are separated, this kind of thing will keep happening,” said Ahmed Diriye Diriye, spokesperson for the Hawiye clan, adding that the truce was still intact.
The insurgents are drawn from the Hawiye and the Islamist movement, formerly known as the Somalia Council of Islamic Courts.
Ethiopian and Somali troops defeated the Islamist movement, which had Hawiye backing and ruled southern Somalia for the last half of 2006, in a brief war over the New Year.
Another Mogadishu resident told Reuters that Tuesday’s fighting was as intense as clashes between March 29 and April 1 which killed 1 000 people and sent over 200 000 fleeing.
”The fighting last night was as bad as the four days’ war, the only thing missing was the helicopter gunships but the intensity of shelling was the same,” the resident, who did not want to be named, told Reuters.
”I and my friend spent the night at the mosque, we could not trust our homes.”
A mortar fell through the roof of the Baar Ubax bakery that supplies most of the bread in the city but workers there said no one was injured.
The transitional government is the 14th attempt at establishing central rule since warlords toppled dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. – Reuters