Baidoa

Somalia’s al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabaab overran and looted UN Mine Action Service compounds, witnesses said on Friday.

An unidentified aircraft bombed an Islamist rebel stronghold in central Somalia on Thursday, witnesses said.

Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi reshuffled his Cabinet on Wednesday, sacking three ministers as the government seeks to reassert its authority in the chaotic nation after a war ousted rival Islamists. Gedi’s sackings are a contrast to last year when he narrowly escaped a no-confidence vote and struggled to keep his Cabinet intact amid a flurry of resignations.

Somali lawmakers on Wednesday elected a former warlord as their new speaker, two weeks after firing his predecessor for brokering unauthorised peace talks with an Islamist movement. A day after President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed sought to rally support behind his embattled government, the MPs overwhelmingly endorsed Justice Minister Aden Mohamed Nur.

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.

A United States military gunship launched air raids against hideouts of members of the al-Qaeda network in southern Somalia, hitting right on target, the Somali government said on Tuesday. ”The target was a small village called Badel where the terrorists were hiding,” government spokesperson Abdirahman Dinari said.

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.

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.

Somali Islamists and their Ethiopian-allied government rivals shelled each other for a third day on Thursday, a day after a European Union envoy said the two sides had agreed to new peace talks. Deputy Defence Minister Salad Ali Jelle said the fighting erupted in the morning near Dinsoor, 100km south-west of the government’s surrounded stronghold, Baidoa.

Somali authorities were questioning two suspects on Friday over a suicide attack in Baidoa, where the country’s weak government is based, as war fears grew in the shattered African nation. Eight people were killed in Thursday’s car-bombing, which the security forces suggested was the work of a powerful Islamist movement.

The United Nations special envoy for Somalia on Monday won a pledge from the country’s weak government to patch up an internal rift on how to deal with powerful Islamists, with whom it is on the brink of war. After talks aimed at reviving efforts to avert all-out conflict, the government said it would reconcile with a maverick Parliament speaker.

Heavily armed militiamen surrounded the home of the commander of Somalia’s police force on Monday, officials said, underscoring the tenuous authority of the country’s transitional government. The move on the house of General Ali Hussein Loyan by a local commander in the government’s temporary seat of Baidoa follows a deadly September gun battle between the police and the militia.

Hundreds of Ethiopian soldiers moved into the temporary seat of Somalia’s weak government on Monday to protect the administration from feared attacks by powerful Islamists, witnesses said. Between 300 and 400 uniformed Ethiopian soldiers in heavy trucks rolled into Baidoa after Islamist forces seized a key southern port overnight, they said.

The Somali government on Tuesday appealed for international help to investigate a failed bid to assassinate President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, blamed on the al-Qaeda network, which killed 11 people. As authorities interrogated two suspects, government spokesperson Abdirahman Mohamed Nur Dinari said they needed foreign expertise to investigate the attack.

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.

An explosion rocked the temporary seat of the weak Somali government on Monday near the Parliament building where the country’s interim president was addressing lawmakers, witnesses said. ”There was an explosion near the Parliament building,” government spokesperson Abdrahman Mohamed Nur Dinari said.