A wave of attacks killed a civilian and wounded five others in the Somali capital on Saturday, witnesses said, as Islamists vowed to wage a stronger insurgency to drive Ethiopian forces out.
A gunman killed a local telecom employee in volatile Bakara market, said Salad Ali, the worker’s colleague, of latest in a wave of indiscriminate attacks that have convulsed the seaside city of Mogadishu.
Separately, two grenade explosions targeting a police patrol wounded five people, including an officer, near Holwadag police station, witness Mohamed Sheikh Jellow said.
Insurgents overnight fired grenades at the Hotel Lafweyn where Somali National Reconciliation Congress delegates are staying, injuring two, said police spokesperson Abduwahid Mohamed. ”They suffered small injuries, but police are investigating the incident,” Mohamed told reporters.
Delegate Mohamud Haji Mohamed, who was at the hotel, said one grenade exploded inside the hotel while the rest detonated outside.
Meanwhile, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, chief of the Union of Islamic Courts, said insurgents will step up their fight until all Ethiopian forces deployed in Mogadishu to bolster the feeble government are withdrawn. ”They will be pushed out from Somalia and we will take back our freedom by force … Until we get that point, we will continue the fighting,” Ahmed said in the Eritrean capital, Asmara, the base of the Somali government foes.
The Mogadishu hotel attack came a week after insurgents killed Moalim Harun, a respected Somali elder participating in the laborious government-sponsored peace parley. Although the process is getting international backing, it has been boycotted by the top Islamist militants and a large part of the capital’s dominant Hawiye clan.
Instead, there are separate talks in Asmara on September 1, an event that analysts warn will further polarise efforts to normalise the poor nation of 10-million.
Although Ahmed urged the United Nations and Western powers to support his initiative, he renewed salvos against the United States, which backed Ethiopia in its moves to drive Islamists from much of south and central Somalia early 2007, ending their six-month rule.
”The US is a large government, but they are supporting Ethiopia, supporting the dictator [Ethiopian Prime Minister] Meles Zenawi, who is killing our people.
”Instead, we appeal to European countries, to the US, to the UN, to support us,” he said, acknowledging Washington’s influence in peacemaking.
Mogadishu — the epicentre of violence — had experienced a brief relative respite following a tough security crackdown coinciding with the July 15 opening of the talks. The fitful talks have barely made progress despite backing from the West, whose intelligence agencies fear that an unstable Somalia could be a safe haven for terrorists.
Since the Ethiopian-Somali alliance wrested back control of Mogadishu in April, the Islamist-led insurgency has reverted to guerrilla-style tactics, launching daily attacks against government targets.
Eritrea, accused by the UN of arming the Islamists, blamed the Somali chaos on Washington’s flawed policy of backing Addis Ababa. ”Invasion and repression always give rise to opposition, and thus the current instability in Somalia is a direct consequence of the US’s misguided polices,” said an editorial in the Profile newspaper, Asmara’s mouthpiece.
Somalia, wounded by its long colonial past, was throttled after the 1960 liberation from the British and the Italians by years of a devastating civil war, leading to the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. This touched off a bloody power struggle that has defied numerous peace initiatives, effectively cementing Somalia as an archetypal ”failed state”, and prompted botched military and humanitarian intervention by the UN and the US in the early 1990s.
Overnight on Thursday, eight people were killed in Mogadishu after intense fighting, the latest in a string of fatalities in the bloody contest for the capital.
The countryside, which has been relatively calm, has seen a surge of interclan anarchy over access to dwindling water and pasture land, with the latest clash last week killing 20 people in central Somalia.
A combined Somalia-Ethiopia forces and at least 1 500 African Union peacekeepers have failed the stem the bloodletting in Mogadishu. Several African nations that pledged to contribute peacekeepers have balked in the face of the escalating insurgency. — Sapa-AFP