Fighting erupts in Somalia

2006-12-08 18:25

Mogadishu - Fierce fighting erupted on Friday between forces loyal to Somalia's weak Ethiopian-backed government and powerful Islamists south of the government's seat of Baidoa, said the two sides.

A senior Islamist official and top military commander as well as a government colonel said clashes began at midday around Dinsoor, 110km south of Baidoa.

"Heavy fighting has begun in the Dinsoor area," Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, head of the executive wing of the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (Sics), told a large crowd in the capital after Friday prayers.

He said the clashes began when a joint Somali government-Ethiopian force attacked Islamist fighters near Dinsoor, where the two sides have been girding for battle for the past 10 days.

"Our forces have been raided by Ethiopian troops, so people get up and fight against the Ethiopians," said Ahmed, urging Somalis to join a holy war against Ethiopian troops and oppose a proposed UN-authorised peacekeeping mission.

'Stand up and defeat the enemies'

"Stand up and defeat the enemies who have invaded our land," he told several hundred people in Mogadishu protesting the UN security council's adoption on Wednesday of a resolution authorising regional peacekeepers for Somalia.

The government's deputy defence minister, Salat Ali Jelle, said he was unable to contact his forces on the ground around Dinsoor, which the administration claimed to have re-taken from the Islamists earlier this week.

But a senior government commander confirmed the clashes, which he described is the "heaviest of all the recent encounters" with Islamists.

"I can confirm to you that there is very heavy fighting in Dinsoor area, but I do not know the causality figures," said Colonel Abdulsak Afgadud, declining to comment on the Islamist claims of Ethiopian involvement.

'Many people have died'

Residents of Dinsoor could not immediately be reached for comment but an Islamist commander in Somalia's Bay region, where both Dinsoor and Baidoa are located, said the fighting was fierce.

"I don't have the exact toll, but I am told many people have died," the commander, said Sheikh Mohamed Ibrahim Bilal.

"Our Islamic fighters were attacked by a combined force of Ethiopian troops and government militia."

The reports of fighting in Dinsoor came after Islamist fighters and forces loyal to the pro-government administration of the northeastern enclave of Puntland traded heavy artillery fire in central Somalia.

The developments pitched the lawless nation closer to all-out war that many fear could spread throughout the Horn of Africa, drawing in Ethiopia and its arch-foe Eritrea, which is accused of backing the Islamists.

- SAPA