By SALAD DUHUL
Saturday, April 21, 2007
The U.N. refugee agency said hundreds of thousands of Mogadishu residents had fled in recent days — out of the city‘s total population of about 2 million — and on Saturday hundreds of women, children and men joined them.
On Friday, the U.N. refugee agency revised its estimate of the number of people who fled Mogadishu since February to 321,000, up from 218,000, saying the additional figures were from new information about Mogadishu residents who had fled to central Somalia towns.
"I call on the both sides to stop the fighting and shelling without any condition," to save civilian lives, Sudan Ali Ahmed, Elman‘s chairman, told The Associated Press, describing the violence Saturday as the worst in recent years.
On Saturday, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Michael Ranneberger, said it would be wrong to characterize the recent bloodshed in Mogadishu as a full-blown Islamic insurgency.
Ranneberger, whose mandate also includes Somalia, said the violence has been unorganized and carried out by clan rivals and remnants of an ousted Islamic movement that has threatened an Iraq -style insurgency.
Somali troops backed by Ethiopian forces ousted the Council of Islamic Courts in December from Mogadishu and other strongholds. Since then the capital has seen of waves of violence. The most deadly began in late March and saw hundreds of people killed, most of them civilians.
Source: AP, April 21, 2007