April 18, 2007
Ethiopian army units facing off against the Islamists for days in the volatile al Kamin neighbourhood initiated the fighting that erupted late Tuesday near the presidential palace, they said.
"They are violating (the truce) by shelling the town and killing people aimlessly," said Ahmed Diriye, a spokesman for the Hawiye, a dominant clan in Mogadishu.
"What I can tell you is that Ethiopian forces have restarted the fighting again," he said.
The clashes broke out despite a truce announced earlier this month by Hawiye elders after talks with Ethiopian military commanders.
Diriye said the Ethiopians had reneged on a key term in the agreement requiring both sides to surrender territories acquired in recent fighting and to withdraw their forces from the frontline.
"They don't want to fulfill the ceasefire agreement (and) that is why they are responsible for what happened and whatever happens," he said after emergency talks among the elders.
Leaders of the Ethiopian force have refused to meet again with the elders until commanders of the Islamist insurgent movement agree to attend.
The Ethiopian troops have been deployed in the country since the start of the year to boost a UN-backed transitional government, which with international help has ousted the Islamists from much of southern and central Somalia.
Officials said President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, whose palace was pounded by mortar shells late Tuesday, had left the city. But they would not say where he had gone.
"I am not sure if his leaving is related to the fighting, but overnight, some mortar shells landed inside and outside the palace where he was staying," said one palace official.
Seven people were killed, several civilians wounded and houses demolished in the latest fighting on Tuesday, witnesses said.
It followed four days of intense fighting from March 29 when Ethiopian troops launched a crackdown on insurgents accused of attacking government and Ethiopian army positions in the capital.
Elders said that at least 1,000 people had been killed and more than 4,000 wounded in what humanitarian groups described as the worst fighting in 15 years. The UN says at least 124,000 have fled the city since February.
Top Islamist leader Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, who is currently in Eritrea, has called on Somalis to intensify their resistance to Ethiopian forces, whom he accused of "destruction and genocide against defenseless civilians."
In Mogadishu, Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi reshuffled his cabinet and also named a former warlord as the country's police chief.
Gedi, whose government is beset by infighting, named former Mogadishu warlord Abdi Hassan Awale Qeybdid as the new police commissioner, replacing Ali Mohamed Loyan who was appointed as the country's ambassador to Tanzania.
Somalia, a nation of about 10 million, has lacked an effective government since the ousting of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 touched off a power struggle that exploded into inter-clan warfare.
Some 1,500 African Union peacekeepers from Uganda deployed in the lawless capital early March have failed to stem the upsurge in violence.
The Ugandans are an advance contingent of about 8,000 peacekeepers the pan-African body plans to deploy in Somalia to help Yusuf maintain control of the country.
Source: AFP, April 18, 2007