Saturday, August 25, 2007
The insurgents overnight hurled three grenades at Hotel Lafweyn where delegates attending the Somali National Reconciliation Congress are staying, injuring the pair, said police spokesman Abduwahid Mohamed.
"They suffered small injuries, but police are investigating the incident," Mohamed told reporters.
A delegate staying at the hotel, Mohamud Haji Mohamed, said one grenade exploded inside the building while the rest detonated outside.
"We were woken by a heavy explosion inside the hotel and minutes later, I realised it was an insurgent attack that left two delegates wounded," he told AFP.
A hotel security guard said the insurgents escaped after the attack.
Meanwhile, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, chief of the executive arm of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), said insurgents would step up their fight until all Ethiopian forces deployed in Mogadishu to bolster the feeble Somali government are withdrawn.
"They will be pushed out from Somalia and we will take back our freedom by force," Ahmed told AFP in the Eritrean capital Asmara, the base of the Somali government foes.
"We have a right to live in peace and in freedom and a right to manage our affairs ourselves.... Until we get that point, we will continue the fighting," Ahmed said.
The Mogadishu hotel attack came a week after insurgents killed Moalim Harun, a respected Somali elder participating in the labourious government-sponsored clan reconciliation parley in the capital.
While the process has been supported by the international community, it has been boycotted by the top Islamist militants and a large part of the capital's dominant Hawiye clan.
The Islamists are planning parallel peace talks in Asmara on September 1, an event that analysts warn would further polarize efforts to normalise the Horn of Africa nation of 10 million.
Although Ahmed urged the United Nations and Western powers to support the Islamist initiative, he renewed salvos against the United States, which backed Ethiopia in its moves to drive Islamists from Somalia.
"The US is a large government, but they are supporting Ethiopia, supporting the dictator (Ethiopian prime minister) Meles Zenawi, who is killing our people."
"Instead, we appeal to European countries, to the US, to the UN, to support us," he added, apparently acknowledging the weight of Washington's backing in global peace bids.
Mogadishu - the epicentre of recent violence - had experienced a short period of relative respite following a tough security crackdown coinciding with the July 15 opening of the talks.
The fitful talks have barely made progress despite huge backing from the UN and several Western powers, who fear that an unstable Somalia could be a safe haven for terrorists and extremist groups.
An Islamist militia that had briefly taken control of large parts of Somalia in 2006 were defeated by Ethiopian troops fighting alongside government forces.
Since the Ethiopian-Somali alliance wrested back control of Mogadishu in April, the Islamist-led insurgency has reverted to guerrilla-style tactics, launching daily hit-and-run attacks against government targets.
Somalia, wounded by its long colonial past, was throttled after the 1960 liberation from the British and the Italians by years of a devastating civil war, leading to the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
This touched off a bloody power struggle that has defied numerous peace initiatives, effectively cementing Somalia as an archetypal "failed state", and prompted botched military and humanitarian intervention by the UN and the US in the early 1990s.
Overnight Thursday, eight people were killed in Mogadishu, the latest in a string of fatalities in the bloody contest for the seaside capital.
The countryside, which has been relatively calm, has seen a surge of interclan fighting over access to dwindling water and pasture land, with the lastest clash last week killing 20 people in central Somalia.
A combined Somalia-Ethiopia forces and at least 1,500 African Union peacekeepers have failed the stem the bloodletting in Mogadishu.
Several African nations that pledged to contribute peacekeepers have balked in the face of the escalating insurgency and the country's unnerving hostility towards peacekeepers.
Source: AFP, Aug 25, 2007