15 killed as fighting intensifies in Somalia

MOGADISHU: Fierce fighting in southern Somalia intensified on Sunday bringing the death toll from two days of clashes between rival factions to 15 with scores wounded, witnesses, hospital staff and militia commanders said. "At least 15 have so far been killed and 35 wounded," said a nurse in Baidoa, some 250 kilometres west of Mogadishu, where the fighting has raged since early Saturday. "The number doesn’t include those who were slightly wounded and treated in makeshift clinics," the nurse told AFP.

The fighting for control of the town pits gunmen loyal to Colonel Hassan Mohammed Nur Shatigudud, agriculture minister in the transitional Somali government, against those allied with Mohammed Ibrahim Habsadi, both of whom are members of Somalia’s transitional parliament. Witnesses said both sides were using rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles and battlewagons, the Somali term for machine-gun mounted pick-up trucks, indiscriminately.

By early Sunday, Habsadi’s fighters had driven their rivals from the narrow streets of the bullet-scarred town amid fears that Shatigudud’s fighters were regrouping for a fresh assault, according to Ahmed Amin, a Baidoa baker. But despite a lull in the fighting downtown, witnesses said the militias continued to clash on the outskirts of Baidoa. Although both warlords belong to the Digil-Mirifle, one of the four major clans in the anarchic, war-shattered African nation, Habsadi and Shatigudud are on opposite sides of a deep dispute over the government’s plans to relocate from exile in Kenya.

Habsadi accused the government of supporting Shatigudud to oust him from Baidoa, one of two towns, along with Jowhar north of Mogadishu, where President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed wants to relocate the transitional administration. "The continuation of violence in Baidoa is being masterminded by the government officials based in Nairobi," he told AFP. "It is regrettable that a government purporting to be for reconciliation is advocating renewed fighting."Habsadi and a large number of other Somali lawmakers insist that the government move to Mogadishu and not to any other town while Shatigudud backs Yusuf’s proposal. Supporters of Shatigudud, meanwhile, accused the dominant Hawiye clan, which controls the lawless capital, of deploying gunmen and battlewagons to support Habsadi.