06 Dec 2004 13:53:44 GMT
MOGADISHU, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Factional fighting in central Somalia killed an estimated 100 people, wounded more than 180 and displaced thousands in the past five days, residents said on Monday.
Women and children were among those wounded in the violence, which erupted around Gelinsor town in Mudug region near the Ethiopian border on Wednesday and spread over the weekend to Hobyo town on the Indian Ocean, eyewitnesses said.
There has been no firm word on what triggered the initial violence but subsequent killings created a revenge cycle that was fuelling the fighting, residents told Reuters in Mogadishu by radio.
Thousands of civilians have fled the affected towns as militiamen battle each other using light artillery, anti-tank missiles, anti-aircraft guns fired horizontally and heavy machineguns mounted on pickup trucks.
One resident reported that some fighters had also used a number of T-54 tanks, leftovers from the defunct army of the government of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, ousted in 1991.
Since his overthrow the country has been a patchwork of fiefdoms run by warlords backed up by heavily armed militias, though a new Somali government formed in neighbouring Kenya aims to go home and reestablish order in the coming months.
According to medical sources, some of the wounded were taken to hospitals in Galkayo and Adaado Harardhere towns as well as hospitals in the capital Mogadishu.
Elders of the two sides and neighbouring clans in central Somalia did not intervene because of the intensity of the fighting, witnesses say.
The clashes pit fighters of the Saad wing of the Habr Gedir subclan of the Hawiye, Somalia's commercially most powerful clan, against the Habr Gedir's Suleiman wing.