Thousands poured back into Mogadishu on Monday after a four-day calm, but an African Union commander warned that fighting could erupt again and a humanitarian crisis still looms.
”It’s not yet a time to celebrate,” said AU commander Lieutenant Katumba Wamala, in charge of 1 500 Ugandan troops, the first contingent of a peacekeeping force struggling to get off the ground in Somalia.
Four days after Islamist insurgents and clan fighters melted away in the face of heavy fire by Somali-backed Ethiopian troops, Wamala warned that insurgent fighters now hiding in the city could still pose a threat.
”Once they come out [and] surrender, their lives will be protected. If that is not done, then we could have a situation where those small groups become a source of insecurity,” he said.
After nine days of heavy clashes died down on Thursday, up to 400 000 displaced civilians began returning home from squalid camps on the outskirts of the city.
”From my visit around the city, I have realised that there is a looming humanitarian catastrophe,” Wamala told a press conference here. ”People are in dire need of everything from water to medicine to food to shelter.
”Unfortunately the international community has deserted Somalia and I want [to] make a call … this is not a time to desert the Somali community; this is the time when Somali people need more.”
An Agence France-Presse correspondent saw thousands of people, aboard trucks and on foot, streaming back to the capital, reduced in some areas to a complex of ruins after the latest fighting in the city’s war-torn history.
Ethiopian forces, which entered Somalia last year to help the weak interim government oust an Islamist force from the country’s south and central regions, have since faced a growing insurgency, mainly in Mogadishu.
The United Nations says up to 400 000 people have fled the capital since February and that more people have been internally displaced than in Iraq during the same period. — Sapa-AFP