113 Somali civilians killed in 3 days in Mogadishu
April 20, 2007 (MOGADISHU) — At least 113 civilians have been killed during three days of heavy fighting in the Somali capital, a Somali human rights group said Friday.
Between Wednesday and 2 p.m. (1100GMT) Friday, 229 people were wounded, said Sudan Ali Ahmed, chairman of the decade-old Elman Human Rights Organization. He said his organization collated the figures from hospitals, local residents and its agents recording burials in Mogadishu.
“We condemn both sides of the conflict and call on them to immediately stop the mass massacre in the capital,” Ahmed told The Associated Press.
On Friday, the U.N. refugee agency revised its estimates of people who fled Mogadishu to 321,000, up from 218,000 this week, saying the additional figures were from new information about Mogadishu residents who had fled to central Somalia towns.
Somalia’s capital is estimated to have a population of 2 million people.
The U.N. refugee agency said that through Somali non-governmental organizations it had began giving relief supplies to about 40,000 people who fled Mogadishu to Afgoye, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) west. It said, however, that the work was now hampered because a suicide car bombing had been staged on the road from Mogadishu, where there is a warehouse of relief supplies.
The U.N. children’s agency said it was trying to respond to appeals from Somali civil society for more help. “But our access is limited. And so we reiterate our call to all parties involved in the conflict to do everything within their power to allow us to reach those who need our assistance the most,” the agency’s top Somalia official, Christian Balslev-Olesen, said in a statement.
Mogadishu streets were the scene of continuous heavy fighting on Friday between insurgents and Ethiopian troops backing the government. On Thursday, a suicide car bomb exploded at an Ethiopian army base that government officials blamed on al-Qaida elements.
The only casualties were people killed inside the car, Deputy Defense Minister Salad Ali Jelle said by phone, adding that he did not know how many died. A witness contradicted Jelle’s account, saying he saw wounded Ethiopian soldiers at the scene. Hundreds of Ethiopian soldiers live at the base, which is surrounded by a low wall and has an ungated entrance.
On Friday, a spokesman for Ethiopia’s foreign affairs ministry denied the base had been struck by a suicide car bombing.
“That is false. It is unfounded. No Ethiopian soldiers died,” Solomon Abebe told The Associated Press in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
The radical Somali Islamic movement was linked to al-Qaida by U.S. and other counterterrorism experts. The U.S. State Department believes al-Qaida operatives in Somalia are at least partially responsible for the growing violence in Mogadishu. Diplomats have said, though, that also involved in the violence are clan militias vying for power that are not necessarily linked to the Islamic insurgents.
In the Eritrean capital, Asmara, senior Somali Islamic leader Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, Somalia’s Deputy Prime Minister Hussein Aided and former speaker Sharif Hassan Sheik Aden called for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from their country.
The three leaders said in a statement that if the Ethiopian troops do not withdraw peacefully, Somalis will rise up and force them out, Eritrea’s Ministry of Information reported on its Web site late Thursday.
U.S. officials have named Eritrea as a supporter the months-old insurgency in Somalia’s capital, something Eritrea has denied. Eritrea and Ethiopia are historic rivals, and there had been concerns they were fighting a proxy war in Somalia.
Somalia has not had an effective national government since 1991, when warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then turned on one another, throwing the country into anarchy.
The transitional government was formed in 2004 with U.N. help, but has struggled to extend its control over the country.
(AP)