A further 90 rebels are surrounded, says Abdi Mohamoud Omar, president of the Somali region of Ethiopia, and unless they surrender, further measures will be taken against them.
The force of around 200 rebels landed on the Red Sea coast on Saturday, the authorities in Somaliland said. They were then taken by truck to the Ethiopian border.
Factional fighting
Somaliland – which has declared independence from the rest of Somalia but has not been internationally recognised – has previously helped the Ethiopian government in its fight against the ONLF (Ogaden National Liberation Front).
Mr Abdi says his forces encircled the ONLF rebels in the remote Maar Maar mountains, which form the porous border region between Somaliland, Ethiopia and Djibouti.
A senior ONLF commander, known as Hassan Bossaso, was captured, Mr Abdi told the BBC.
Ethiopia blames its regional arch-enemy, Eritrea, for supporting the ONLF – an accusation Eritrea denies.
The ONLF wants self-determination for residents of Ethiopia’s Somali region, which is also known as Ogaden.
In recent months, the Ethiopian government has signed peace agreements with various ONLF factions, says the BBC World Service’s Africa editor, Martin Plaut.
However, Ethiopia has not ended its conflict with the group led by the former head of the Somali navy, Admiral Mohamed Omar Osman.
This is the group reported to have mounted the latest attack, although our editor says it has now been all but eliminated as a rebel force.
ADDIS ABABA, September 14 (Reuters) – Ethiopia’s ONLF rebel group denied on Tuesday that almost 300 of its fighters were surrounded in Somaliland after landing on the breakaway region’s coast following training in Eritrea.
The assertions were made by Somaliland’s army and its police force on Tuesday. The officials also said the Ethiopian military had joined the battle. Ethiopian government spokespeople were unavailable for comment.
ONLF sources in Ethiopia told Reuters the reports were lies.
“This is untrue,” a senior ONLF member said. “There are no ONLF units in Somaliland. There are no ONLF units outside the borders of Ethiopia.” An ONLF-linked website also denied that ONLF fighters were in Somaliland.
“There is politics and Ethiopian favour-seeking motives behind the spread of this rumour,” Ogaden Online said.
The ONLF wants independence for Ethiopia’s mainly ethnic-Somali Ogaden region and has warned international oil and gas companies to stay away or face attack.
Firms including Petronas and the Vancouver-based Africa Oil Corporation are exploring the Ogaden for potential oil and gas reserves.
“This is the largest number of insurgents to enter the country,” the commander of Somaliland’s army, Nouh Ismail Tani, told Reuters. “Their destination was Ethiopia but they were using our country as a crossing point. A joint operation is going smoothly. I hope it will not take more than 3 days.”
Somaliland officials said the men had guns and were carrying 64 rocket launchers. Some of them had Eritrean currency and documents that proved they were trained in Eritrea, police commander Elmi Roble Furre said.
Eritrea has long denied financing rebel groups in Ethiopia and Somalia. Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a 1998-2000 border war that killed at least 70,000 people, and relations between the two have been bitter since.
The United Nations sanctioned Eritrea in December, accusing it of financing Somalia’s Islamist al Shabaab rebels. Eritrea denies that.
Ethiopian forces launched an assault against the ONLF — who have been fighting for more than 20 years — after a 2007 attack on an oil exploration field owned by a subsidiary of China’s Sinopec Corp, Asia’s biggest refinery.
(Additional reporting by Husein Ali Noor; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
