Rotting corpses lay in the open and explosions shook Mogadishu on Sunday for a fifth day of battles between insurgents and allied Somali-Ethiopian troops that have killed at least 230 people, locals said.
Illustrating regional divisions many say are fomenting the escalating war, Eritrea pulled out of the East African regional group Igad (Inter-Governmental Authority on Development) after a rift with Ethiopia over Somalia. The feuding neighbours each accuse the other of stirring the conflict.
In an ever-growing exodus some say is nearing half a million people, hundreds more Somalis trudged out of Mogadishu on Sunday, dragging and carrying belongings on their head.
”I have lost all hope,” one woman said, walking at the head of 11 relatives, mainly children.
Terrified residents listened to the sound of mortars through the night, mainly from the north where fighting has been worst.
With an insurgency simmering since the ouster of militant Islamist rulers from Mogadishu at the New Year, this week’s violence has been one of the worst sustained flare-ups since.
The local Elman Peace and Human Rights Organisation, which tracks casualties from hospitals, families and counts on the street, said at least 41 civilians and six insurgents died on Sunday, adding to 52 on Saturday, and 131 from Wednesday to Friday.
Residents fear, however, that the real toll could be much higher, while the number of Ethiopian and Somali government soldiers killed is also unclear.
A previous four-day spike in battles at the end of March killed at least 1 000 people, again mainly civilians.
Around Mogadishu, rebels are barricaded behind makeshift sandbanks and race through streets on pick-ups turned into battle-wagons. Ethiopian and Somali government troops fire heavy artillery and make forays into their strongholds with armoured cars.
Bodies lay on the streets on Sunday, some mutilated and decapitated by incessant shelling that has pulverised residential neighbourhoods considered Islamist strongholds.
The main Madina hospital was so full that the wounded were forced into tents in the garden or just under trees.
Makeshift graves
With Somalis keen to bury their dead quickly in accord with Muslim custom, some were digging makeshift graves by the road.
The Islamists ruled most of south Somalia for the second half of 2006, before being defeated by the interim government and its Ethiopian military backers in a war over the New Year.
But Islamist fighters — backed by some disgruntled Hawiye clan elements and foreign jihadists — have regrouped to rise up against President Abdullahi Yusuf’s administration and his Ethiopian backers whom they regard as hated foreign invaders.
Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Gedi stressed that his government was at war only with extremists and that this was not a clan conflict.
”Until the terrorists are wiped out from Somalia, the fighting will go on,” Gedi was quoted as saying by local Shabelle media group.
”I want to tell the Somali people and the world that there is no so-called fighting between Hawiye clan and the government. The battle is clearly between terrorists linked to al-Qaeda and the government supported by Ethiopian and African Union troops.”
A 1 500-strong AU force has failed to stem the violence.
Ethiopia accuses Eritrea of sending arms and men to support the Islamists, while Asmara says Addis Ababa is occupying Somalia illegally at the behest of the United States.
Eritrea’s exit from the seven-member Inter-Governmental Authority on Development was a blow to diplomatic efforts to unite foreign opinion on pacifying Somalia.
”The government of Eritrea was compelled to take the move due to the fact that a number of repeated and irresponsible resolutions that undermine regional peace and security have been adopted in the guise of Igad,” an Eritrean statement said.
A recent Igad meeting backed Ethiopia over Eritrea.
Still bitter over a 1998 to 2000 border war, analysts say the two nations are using Somalia as a proxy war. — Reuters