Friday, Nov 30, 2007
Three men with pistols shot dead the district officer of Borbhere, an area in north Somalia, while he was praying in a mosque, police said.
"Police around the mosque killed one of them and seized the other two killers," police spokesman Abdullahi Omar said.
In the worst clashes for more than a week, Ethiopian troops backing Somalia's interim government fought insurgents in the Suqa Holaha vicinity on Thursday.
"Five people were killed during the fighting, which stopped after midday, and then in the afternoon residents began burying the dead," Fartun Osman, a witness, told Reuters by phone.
Then five more died in clashes on the same day in Yaqshid district, where government troops were searching for weapons and rebels, locals said on Friday.
All the casualties were thought to be civilians, although the army says witnesses mistake insurgents for residents.
Somalia's military, which has been fighting Islamist-led insurgents all year, said operations were still under way on Friday in northern areas of Mogadishu. The Horn of Africa nation has seen little stability for the last 16 years.
President Abdullahi Yusuf's fragile administration has faced Iraq-style attacks since its Ethiopian military allies helped it rout the Islamist Courts movement from Mogadishu at the end of 2006. The pro-sharia group had ruled the city for six months.
The fighting has displaced some 600,000 Mogadishu residents from their homes, 215,000 of them just in the last month, according to United Nations figures.
"The humanitarian response is not yet commensurate with the enormous needs of the vulnerable people," said the Somalia branch of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (U.N. OCHA) in a report on the latest refugee movements.
U.N. OCHA said eight kitchen sites had been set up in Mogadishu to feed the urban poor, while food aid distributions had begun on the road between Mogadishu and Afgoye, where many refugees are travelling or have set up shelters.
A Somali general, Yusuf Hussein Dhumaal, complained that media were giving an incorrect picture of the conflict by reporting civilian deaths that were actually insurgent casualties.
"The radios always say civilians were killed when insurgents in plainclothes are killed in the government's operations," he said. "The areas where the searches are taking place are not residential areas now."
Somali journalists are under a series of restrictions imposed by Mogadishu's mayor, including a ban on reporting government military operations or interviewing rebels. (Editing by Robert Woodward)
Source: Reuters, Nov 30, 2007