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/ 17 January 2007
Somalia’s Parliament voted on Wednesday to oust powerful speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan, who fell out with the president and prime minister late last year after he made peace overtures to Islamists. ”The speaker is out,” Somali legislator Ali Basha told Reuters by phone from the Parliament, which is in a converted grain warehouse in the interim capital, Baidoa.
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/ 24 December 2006
Ethiopian forces, committed to defending an interim Somali government holed up in the town of Baidoa, launched air strikes on Sunday against Islamist fighters across the country, witnesses said. It was the first use of air strikes and the first public admission by Ethiopia of its involvement in Somalia, whose interim government is surrounded by heavily armed fighters of the powerful Somalia Islamic Courts Council.
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/ 22 December 2006
Ethiopian tanks rolled to the battlefront on Friday as Somali Islamists and Somalia’s pro-government troops pounded each other with artillery and rockets in a fourth day of clashes edging closer to all-out war. The Islamists said they would send ground troops to attack en masse on Saturday, ast opposed o fighting from a distance with heavy weapons as the two sides have done so far.
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/ 21 December 2006
Somalia’s Islamists are at war against Ethiopia, not the government, a hard-line Islamist leader said on Thursday, as fighting raged for a third day between his forces and pro-government troops. Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who was speaking to the media by telephone, also accused Ethiopia of attacking the Islamists in southern Somalia.
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/ 20 December 2006
Somali Islamists and troops defending the government’s only stronghold battled with rockets and heavy weapons on Wednesday at two frontline areas as a European Union envoy flew in to stave off the brewing war. The flare-ups to the south-west and south-east of the interim government’s surrounded outpost, Baidoa, heightened fears of a Horn of Africa conflict.
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/ 19 December 2006
Guns were silent in the sole stronghold of Somalia’s interim government on Tuesday as an Islamist deadline to Ethiopian troops to leave or face holy war passed with conciliatory signs. Around the dusty agricultural trading post where Somalia’s shaky government conducts business from a converted warehouse, residents reported calm.
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/ 15 December 2006
Residents of the town housing Somalia’s interim government stocked up with provisions on Friday as troops tested weaponry ahead of a feared attack by rival Islamists in the Horn of Africa nation. ”I’m afraid when war breaks out, roads will be closed and food is going to be unaffordable,” labourer and father-of-three Said Ali Ahmed said.
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/ 21 September 2006
Hundreds of government supporters gathered in the Somali interim administration’s base on Thursday to call for foreign peacekeepers, three days after President Abdullahi Yusuf escaped an assassination attempt. Women and youth groups in Baidoa shouted pro-government slogans, saying Monday’s suicide bombing exposed the need for foreign troops.
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/ 18 September 2006
A car bomb killed five people and wounded several others outside Parliament in Somalia’s provincial capital Baidoa on Monday in an assassination attempt on President Abdullahi Yusuf. Six attackers were killed in a gun battle with Yusuf’s bodyguards after the blast, Foreign Minister Ismail Hurre Buba told a news conference in Nairobi.
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/ 15 September 2006
Police shot in the air on Friday to disperse a pro-Islamist crowd protesting at the seat of Somalia’s shaky interim government against an African Union plan to send peacekeepers. About 100 people chanting ”God is great!” and ”No to foreign troops!” rallied at the protest organised by religious leaders in Baidoa, the base of the government.