By Sahal Abdulle
Thursday, April 26, 2007
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Ethiopian tanks supporting the Somali interim government pounded rebel positions in Mogadishu on Thursday, intensifying an offensive to wipe out Islamist gunmen and clan militia, fighters and residents said.
"We are under heavy artillery and tank shelling. The Ethiopians are using whatever forces and material they have," said a fighter belonging to the capital’s dominant Hawiye clan. "This is the heaviest attack we’ve seen since the war started."
Insurgents fired back with machineguns, missiles and rocket-propelled grenades in a ninth day of fighting that has centred around an Islamist stronghold in the north of Mogadishu and turned parts of the capital into a ghost town.
Locals and rights activists say nearly 300 people have died in the most sustained fighting since Somali-Ethiopian forces defeated Islamist rivals in a two-week war late last year.
Hospital sources said pregnant women, trapped by gunfire in the area, were stuck in empty classrooms of nearby Mogadishu University.
Doctors at a paediatric and maternity clinic did their best to treat scores of wounded who found no space among the bloodied wards of the city’s two main hospitals.
"We have the doctors but we do not have medical material and medicine. We are hoping to get medical supplies from the Red Cross soon," Abdulahi Hashi Kadiye, director of Banadir Hospital, told Reuters.
The incessant shelling started a fire at warehouses stocked with building material and paints, sending thick plumes of smoke above the Industrial Road area of factories, a charcoal market and soccer stadium, one witness said.
The United Nations says nearly 340,000 people have fled the city, which was once home to at least one million people, and it has warned of a looming catastrophe.
"At least half the capital is deserted, slowly turning it into a ghost city," the U.N. refugee agency said.
The interim Somali government says there will be no let-up in the fighting until it wipes out an insurgency threatening its attempt to restore central rule to the Horn of Africa country for the first time in 16 years.
Source: Reuters, April 26, 2007