Corpses lay on the streets of Mogadishu on Monday after at least 81 people were killed in battles over the weekend between Islamist-led insurgents and Ethiopian troops supporting Somalia’s interim government. Northern districts of the coastal capital suffered the worst of the most intense fighting for months.
Somali Islamist insurgents and Ethiopian troops exchanged mortar fire on Sunday in some of the heaviest clashes in months with at least 20 people killed in the last 24 hours, residents and witnesses said. The fighting was fiercest in the Islamist stronghold of northern Mogadishu.
Somalis uprooted by fighting in Mogadishu looted trucks carrying United Nations food aid on Friday, peacekeepers said, highlighting what relief agencies warn is a fast deteriorating humanitarian catastrophe. Somalia now has one million internal refugees, aid workers say, and their numbers are swelled by an exodus of about 20 000 civilians each month.
Battles erupted in Somalia’s capital on Wednesday between Islamist rebels and Ethiopian troops backing the government a day after the United Nations said it was still too dangerous to send peacekeepers there. Witnesses in northern Mogadishu said three Ethiopian soldiers and at least one insurgent were killed as both sides traded heavy fire.
Hundreds of residents of a remote town in southern Somalia staged an anti-American demonstration on Tuesday after the United States launched an air strike against ”a known al-Qaeda terrorist” there. The town of Dobley was hit by two missiles on Monday in the fourth US strike in 14 months against Somalia.
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/ 17 February 2008
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf escaped unharmed on Sunday when suspected Islamist insurgents hit his presidential compound in Mogadishu with mortar bombs for a second day, one of his aides said. Witnesses said the shelling wounded at least five people.
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/ 25 January 2008
Islamist insurgents briefly seized control of Somalia’s biggest military airfield on Friday and looted weapons, witnesses and an Islamist commander said. Muktar Ali Robow, leader of the al-Shabab rebel militia, told a local radio station his forces also captured government troops during the raid on Baledogle, about 100km west of the capital, Mogadishu.
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/ 24 December 2007
A first contingent of 100 peacekeepers from Burundi deployed in the Somali capital Mogadishu on Sunday, hours after fighting between Islamist rebels and government forces killed at least four people. The arrival of the soldiers marked the first phase of long-delayed support for 1 600 Ugandan troops.
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/ 17 October 2007
Up to 60 Somali intelligence officers stormed a United Nations compound in Mogadishu on Wednesday and seized the World Food Programme’s local chief of operations at gunpoint. WFP said it was forced to suspend food distribution, which started on Monday, to more than 75 000 people in the capital Mogadishu.
Somalia’s prime minister has reached a truce with Mogadishu’s dominant clan, some of whose fighters had supported Islamist-led insurgents in battles with government troops and Ethiopian forces earlier this year. Hawiye clan elders met Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi amid tight security on Monday in the capital, which has been rocked by insecurity since January.