MOGADISHU, 23 April 2007 — Rotting corpses lay in the open and explosions shook Mogadishu yesterday for a fifth day of battles between insurgents and allied Somali-Ethiopian troops that have killed at least 230 people, local residents said.
Illustrating regional divisions that many say are fomenting the escalating war, Eritrea pulled out of the East African group IGAD after a rift with Ethiopia over Somalia. The feuding neighbors each accuse the other of stirring the conflict.
In an ever-growing exodus that some say is nearing half a million people, hundreds more Somalis trudged out of Mogadishu yesterday, dragging and carrying belongings on their head.
“I have lost all hope,” one woman said, walking at the head of 11 relatives, mainly children.
Terrified residents heard the sound of mortars through the night, mainly from the north where fighting has been the worst.
With an insurgency simmering since the ouster of militant Islamist rulers from Mogadishu, this week’s violence has been one of the worst sustained flare-ups.
The local Elman Peace and Human Rights Organization, which tracks casualties from hospitals, families and counts on the street, said at least 41 civilians and six insurgents died yesterday, adding to 52 on Saturday, and 131 from Wednesday to Friday.
Residents fear, however, that the real toll could be much higher, while the number of Ethiopian and Somali government soldiers killed is also unclear.
A previous four-day spike in battles at the end of March killed at least 1,000 people, again mainly civilians.
Around Mogadishu, rebels are barricaded behind makeshift sandbanks and race through streets on pickups turned into battle-wagons. Ethiopian and Somali government troops fire heavy artillery and make forays into their strongholds with armored cars.
Bodies lay on the streets yesterday, some mutilated and decapitated by incessant shelling that has pulverized residential neighborhoods considered Islamist strongholds.
The main Madina Hospital was so full that the wounded were forced into tents in the garden or just under trees.
With Somalis keen to bury their dead quickly in accordance with Muslim custom, some were digging makeshift graves by the road.
The Islamists ruled most of south Somalia for the second half of 2006 before being defeated by the interim government and its Ethiopian military backers in a war over the New Year.
But Islamist fighters — backed by some disgruntled Hawiye clan elements and foreign extremists — have regrouped to rise up against President Abdullahi Yusuf’s administration and his Ethiopian backers whom they regard as hated foreign invaders.
Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Gedi stressed that his government was at war only with extremists and that this was not a clan conflict. “Until the terrorists are wiped out from Somalia, the fighting will go on,” Gedi was quoted as saying by local Shabelle media group.
“I want to tell the Somali people and the world that there is no so-called fighting between Hawiye clan and the government. The battle is clearly between terrorists linked to Al-Qaeda, and the government supported by Ethiopian and African Union troops.”
A 1,500-strong AU force has failed to stem the violence.
