Sunday, April 22, 2007
MOGADISHU (AFP) - Mortar bombs exploded in the Somali capital yesterday, killing at least 52 civilians and swelling the exodus from the city, as Ethiopian soldiers fought Islamist insurgents for a fourth day.
The fighting that has convulsed Mogadishu has now claimed 165 lives since Wednesday, according to a local human rights group that tracks casualty figures.
“At least 52 civilians have been killed in today’s fighting alone, but we are yet to account for the number of those wounded,” said Sudan Ali Ahmed, chairman of the Elman Peace and Human Rights Organisation.
Ahmed said his group arrived at the toll by collating figures from hospitals, other humanitarian groups and counting bodies abandoned in the streets. “This brings the death toll to 165 people killed in four days of fighting here.”
Islamist insurgents and some of Mogadishu’s clan warlords have vowed to oust the Ethiopians who helped Somalia’s UN-backed transitional government in January to expel the Somali Council of Islamic Courts from the city.
The rivals exchanged heavy machinegun fire in the northern Fagah, Ex-Control and Sanaa districts as well as areas around the main Bakara market, where columns of the insurgents’ modified pick-up trucks and Ethiopian tanks raced around the city.
“Today, the Ethiopian forces are using tanks and heavy mortars to fight, they are shooting people house to house,” Ahmed said, appealing to both sides “to stop fighting as soon as possible so that civilians can be helped”.
Residents said a mortar hit a passenger bus in the city’s southern Hodan district, killing four and wounding several others.
A father and his three sons were killed when a shell pounded their house in the Bakara district, said Ali Hassan Aden, a neighbour, while officials at the main Medina hospital reported that three patients died from their wounds.
With no sign of a truce, hundreds of terrified residents fled the city centre to the safer outskirts, an AFP correspondent reported.
Somalia has lacked a functional government since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre exploded into a power struggle that has defied more than 14 attempts to restore stability
Source: AFP, April 22, 2007