Analysts: Ethiopia stopped Islamists from overruning Baidoa

December 25, 2006

A member of a Somali Islamic Courts militia brandishes his weapon (Photo: Reuters)

A MiG fighter struck Mogadishu’s international airport with machinegun fire soon after dawn, airport managing director Abdirahim Adan told Reuters. Three jets later attacked Somalia’s biggest military airfield at Baledogle, 100 km (60 miles) west of Mogadishu.

“They are targeting the runway and I can see it being hit,” said an Islamist fighter who asked not to be named.

The week of intense fighting between Islamists and the Ethiopian- and Western- backed secular interim government has turned long-running hostilities into open war.

Analysts say Ethiopia seems to have halted the initial Islamist assault and saved the government from being overrun.

The Somalia Islamic Courts Council’s (SICC) Web site hailed “mujahideen” troops who, it said, chanted passages from the Koran as they went into battle against militarily superior Ethiopian “crusaders”.

Addis Ababa and Washington say the Islamists, who hold most of southern Somalia after seizing Mogadishu in June, are terrorists backed by Ethiopia’s enemy, Eritrea, and by al Qaeda.

Ethiopia has vowed to protect the government, which is virtually encircled by Islamist fighters in the town of Baidoa, halfway between Mogadishu and the Ethiopian border.

A government spokesman said the administration approved of Ethiopian use of air power.

“Anywhere terrorists use to bring in arms and ammunition deserves to be hit,” said Abdirahman Dinari.

The government said it had closed all borders — a largely symbolic measure given that it has little power beyond Baidoa.

THREAT TO ADDIS

Ethiopia said it had attacked the capital’s airport to stop “illegal flights” following the closure of Somalia’s borders.

“It was also reported some of the extremists were waiting for an airlift out of Mogadishu,” an Ethiopian spokesman said.

Aid agencies, struggling to get help to more than a million Somalis afflicted by conflict and weeks of floods in one of the world’s poorest countries, said they had not been told about the closure of borders.

The Islamists accused Ethiopia of targeting civilians, and repeated a threat to attack its capital. “We shall strike Addis Ababa the way they hit Mogadishu,” SICC spokesman Abdirahman Ali Mudey said. “These air strikes will not continue … even if it means getting weapons from outside.”

Government Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi told Reuters 8,000 foreign fighters had poured into Somalia to back the SICC. He agreed with a recent U.S. accusation that the movement’s top ranks were controlled by al Qaeda.

Both sides say they have killed hundreds of opponents in days of battles with mortars, rockets, machineguns and tanks, but there has been no independent verification.

Residents said Ethiopian troops took control of Baladwayne town on Monday after a day of bombing to uproot the Islamists. To the south, locals in Baidoa saw Ethiopian military trucks ferrying wounded troops to the airport.

“I can see seven big trucks carrying wounded Ethiopian soldiers lying on blood-stained mattresses,” taxi driver Abdullahi Hassan told Reuters by telephone.

The Islamists claim broad popular support and say their main aim is to restore order to Somalia under sharia law after years of anarchy since the 1991 ouster of dictator Siad Barre.

Addis Ababa fears a hardline Muslim state on its doorstep and accuses the SICC of wanting to annex Ethiopia’s ethnically Somali Ogaden region.

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(Additional reporting by Sahal Abdulle in Mogadishu, Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa and Daniel Wallis in Nairobi)

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