Ethiopian forces to pull out of Somalia in 2 weeks – PM

Jan 5, 2007 (DUBAI) — Ethiopia’s prime minister said his country will pull its troops out of neighbouring Somalia within two weeks after helping the Somali interim government rout Islamists in a two-week war.

“We will stay there for a few days to help the transitional government in preserving stability then we will pull out our troops … this will take a week or a maximum of two weeks,” Meles Zenawi told Al Jazeera television in remarks aired on Friday. His remarks were dubbed in Arabic.

“We will not stay there for an extra hour after finishing our mission,” he said. “We have concluded all combat operations.”

Somali Islamists took control of the capital Mogadishu in June and had imposed sharia law across much of the south.

Meles said Ethiopian forces had been “trying to inflict the biggest losses” among the ranks of the Islamists to guarantee that they would not regroup after the withdrawal.

Somali Islamists abandoned Mogadishu last week in the face of advancing Ethiopian and government forces. They said their retreat was a tactical one designed to avoid major bloodshed.

Since then, one Ethiopian soldier has been killed in an ambush in the south and a hand grenade was thrown at Ethiopian troops in the capital on Thursday.

The United States and Ethiopia have portrayed the Islamists as linked to and even run by al Qaeda, putting Somalia firmly on the map of the U.S.-led war against terrorism.

But the Islamists say their support comes from the Somali people and some analysts have predicted they would regroup and fight an insurgency from remote corners of Somalia, or carry out bomb attacks elsewhere in East Africa.

A purported audio tape message by al Qaeda’s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri urged Somali Islamists on Friday to launch an Iraq-style guerrilla campaign of suicide and other forms of attacks against Ethiopian forces in Somalia.

(Reuters)