Somali insurgents killed at least 10 people, including six police officers, in separate attacks hours after rejecting a United Nations-brokered peace deal for the Horn of Africa nation.
An attack on a police base in Mogadishu, and other attacks in the capital and Baidoa, brought to about 40 the number killed in an increase in fighting since the weekend between allied Ethiopian-Somali security forces and Islamist-led insurgents.
The latest attacks came after Islamist hardliners Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys and Sheik Hassan Abdullah Hersi al-Turki — who are both on United Sates and UN lists of al-Qaeda associates — rejected a peace deal signed in Djibouti.
Under UN mediation, the pact was agreed by representatives of Somalia’s government and some members of the exiled opposition Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS) late on Monday.
But with militant ARS members and insurgents on the ground scoffing at the deal, analysts say it will have negligible impact on the fighting.
Aweys and Turki both encouraged insurgents to keep attacking the government and its Ethiopian military allies.
Five officers and one civilian were killed when insurgents opened fire on Tuesday night at a police base — a typical attack in an Iraq-style campaign of hit-and-run raids, bombs and assassinations.
Witnesses saw five bodies in the street and police confirmed the other casualty.
Early on Wednesday, gunmen killed the head of a Somali aid group called Women and Child Care in the Suq Baad neighbourhood in northern Mogadishu.
”The killers soon escaped in a waiting car,” one of the staff, Maryan Taqal Ahmed, told Reuters by phone.
Insurgents also killed a policeman and a taxi-driver in the provincial town of Baidoa, where Somalia’s parliament sits, on Tuesday night. ”They came from an alley and fired at the taxi,” said witness Hawa Farah.
And in Mogadishu, suspected insurgents shot dead a tax-collector on Tuesday night, residents said. — Reuters