Government troops patrol Mogadishu, search for arms

By Sahal Abadulle | April 28, 2007

Somali insurgents take positions in a bunker to fight against Ethiopian soldiers in northern Mogadishu April 26, 2007. Ethiopian tanks supporting the Somali government pounded insurgent positions in Mogadishu on Thursday and Somalia’s prime minister declared significant gains after a nine-day offensive. REUTERS/SHABELLE MEDIA

MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Allied Somali-Ethiopian troops patrolled Mogadishu on Saturday, hunting for weapons after claiming significant gains in battles with insurgents that have killed at least 1,300 people since February.

“The big war finished the day before yesterday,” President Abdullahi Yusuf told reporters at the hilltop presidential palace, which rebels attacked several times in recent weeks.

“The government was fighting the remnants of the Islamic Courts. The government was not at war with the Somali public.”

Interim government forces were deployed on Saturday in the city’s Bakara Market, a former stronghold of rebels frustrating the administration’s efforts to restore central rule in the Horn of Africa nation for the first time in 16 years.

“We are ready to collaborate with the government soldiers and we also welcome their arrival in the area,” Abas Ahmed Duale, spokesman for a committee representing the market’s businessmen, told independent Somali broadcaster Shabelle.

Some homes and commercial properties, including a Coca Cola plant, were looted on Friday as relative calm returned after nine-days of Mogadishu’s heaviest fighting for years.

On Saturday, government troops were posted at strategic junctions in the city, searching cars and passengers for arms.

“DISASTER FOR AFRICA”

The African Union (AU) has called for more peacekeepers to be sent urgently to Mogadishu. Some 1,500 Ugandan soldiers already there have been pinned down by the clashes, restricted to guarding the presidential palace and air and sea ports.

“If we do not deploy troops soon, it will be disaster and a tragedy for Africa,” Alpha Omar Konare, the chairman of the AU Commission, told reporters in Uganda on Friday.

Captain Paddy Ankunda, spokesman for the Ugandan peacekeepers in Mogadishu, called on international aid organisations to help them treat hundreds of injured civilians.

“Every day the wounded keep coming to our medical unit. We are overwhelmed,” he said in comments published by Uganda’s state-owned New Vision newspaper on Saturday.

“We are appealing to the international community and especially the humanitarian agencies to come and do their work. Those making noise in Nairobi should come here and actually assist the people,” Ankunda said.

“Protecting the delivery of humanitarian aid is part of our mandate, but no humanitarian agency has called upon us.”

The United Nations has accused both sides in the conflict of breaking humanitarian law by indiscriminately firing on civilian areas, and says the rate of displacement in Somalia over the past three months has been worse than Iraq in the same period.

Some 350,000 people have fled the city since February, more than a third of its one million population. Thousands have sought shelter in surrounding town and villages, sleeping under trees or out in the open, vulnerable to disease and robbers. (Additional reporting by Farah Roble)