By Sahal Abdulle
Thursday, March 29, 2007
With scenes of carnage shocking even by Mogadishu standards, residents said the final death toll could be much higher.
"Patients are coming to us by the minute, it is too much," one harried doctor at Madina hospital told Reuters by telephone.
"We have admitted 50 patients with weapon-related wounds, three died here, including a 10-year-old boy."
Several Ethiopian helicopter gunships fired rockets, Reuters witnesses said, in the first use of aerial power in the capital during the last few months' increasingly vicious fighting.
Government and Ethiopian forces are pitted against Islamists ousted from Mogadishu over the New Year and disgruntled clan militia who used to run the lawless coastal city.
Amid the chaos, one mortar crashed into a mosque, killing a baby boy there and beheading another teenage boy.
"My children sought refuge at a mosque when it was hit by a mortar shell. My son died and my daughter lost the toes on one of her feet," local police officer Hashim Hussein told Reuters, his voice cracking with emotion.
Another mortar hit a fuel tank, witnesses said, sparking a huge blaze that engulfed a local watchman and truck owner.
Breaking a rocky ceasefire in place since the weekend, the Ethiopian and Somali government soldiers launched attacks from early morning on insurgents' strongholds in the Ramadan area of north Mogadishu, around the main soccer stadium, and elsewhere.
"I have not seen anything like this," said one terrified resident, Hussein Haji. "Whenever the Ethiopians fire their big guns, all my windows and doors are shaking."
TRUCE OVER
Explosions and gunfire rattled around the streets from soon after dawn, sending locals running for cover in their homes.
"Early in the morning, the government troops and Ethiopians attacked us," said one Islamist source involved in the fighting.
The local Shabelle broadcaster said at least 11 people, mainly civilians, had been killed on Thursday.
It also reported two tanks had been destroyed.
"The Ethiopian forces, who are now facing strong resistance, continue to shell," it added. "Two helicopter gunships started bombardments in the rebel positions of the capital."
Reuters journalists, trapped in their buildings by the fighting, saw helicopters firing and thick smoke rising as explosions and gunfire reverberated across the city.
The Ethiopians had brokered the truce at the weekend with Mogadishu's dominant Hawiye clan after a week that saw at least two dozen people killed, dead soldiers dragged through streets and burned, and a plane crash probably caused by a missile.
That fighting was the worst since the war to kick out the Islamists and install President Abdullahi Yusuf's interim government in the capital.
His administration is the 14th attempt at restoring central rule since the 1991 ouster of a military dictator.
The African Union (AU) has sent 1,200 Ugandan troops to help pacify Somalia. But they have also been attacked in a nation that defied a U.N.-U.S. peacekeeping mission in the early 1990s.
Other African nations are baulking at sending further troops needed to boost the AU force to its planned strength of 8,000.
The United Nations said on Thursday that 57,000 people had fled Mogadishu since February, including 12,000 in the last week alone. "They are hungry and face harassment from thugs," the U.N. refugee agency said in a statement.
Source: Reuters, Mar 29, 2007