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Somalia
insurgents hit hard for third day |
Source: Voice
of America (VOA)
Date: 12 Feb 2007
By Alisha Ryu
Nairobi
In Somalia, insurgents opposed to the
interim government and its Ethiopian allies
launched rocket and mortar attacks for the
third straight day in several areas of the
capital, Mogadishu, further threatening the
stability of the Horn of Africa country. VOA
Correspondent Alisha Ryu has details from
our East Africa Bureau in Nairobi.
The latest fighting began overnight, when
insurgents fired rockets at the presidential
palace and a short time later attacked a
police station with rocket-propelled
grenades.
Witnesses say government troops and police
responded with artillery and gunfire,
triggering a battle that lasted several
hours. A mortar, possibly meant to hit a
building housing Ethiopian troops, slammed
into a home, killing a man and his son as
they slept.
The violence came hours after a bomb
exploded Sunday in the port city of Kismayo,
about 500 kilometers south of Mogadishu.
Thousands were attending a rally to support
a proposed African peacekeeping mission to
Somalia, when an explosion ripped through
the crowd, killing and wounding nearly a
dozen people.
On Saturday, at least seven people were
killed in rocket and mortar attacks in and
around the main airport in Mogadishu.
The three days of attacks were the heaviest
since Ethiopian and Somali government troops
ousted Somalia's radical Islamist movement
in late December.
An Islamist group calling itself the
People's Resistance Movement in the Land of
the Two Migrations has claimed
responsibility for much of the recent
violence. The group has called for war
against Ethiopian troops in Somalia and has
threatened to kill any peacekeeper who steps
foot on Somali soil.
The People's Resistance Movement formed
after Somali Islamists, who held much of the
country under strict religious rule for
nearly seven months, lost power to the
U.N.-recognized, secular interim government.
Little is known about the new insurgent
group. But Somali journalist Mohamed Olad
Hassan in Mogadishu says core members are
believed to be hardline supporters of the
vanquished Islamic Courts Union. "Many
believe that the Islamic Courts Union may
have a link with what is going on because
they vowed long and endless, Iraq-style
guerrilla warfare," he said.
Meanwhile, a top Islamist leader, who
surrendered to U.S. and Kenyan authorities
last month, has traveled from Kenya to
Yemen, allegedly under a deal aimed at
securing the freedom of more than a dozen
U.S. troops captured by Islamist forces in
early January.
The unconfirmed report, which appeared in an
Arabic-language newspaper in Yemen, says the
United States agreed to allow Sheik Sharif
Sheik Ahmed to go to Yemen in exchange for
the release of the U.S. servicemen. They
were allegedly seized around the Islamist
stronghold of Ras Kamboni, near Somalia's
border with Kenya, while the United States
carried out air strikes in the area.
The air strikes targeted, but failed to
kill, several radical leaders of the Islamic
Courts Union and three al-Qaida terrorists
on the U.S. most-wanted list.
The Pentagon has repeatedly said that no
U.S. ground troops were deployed in Somalia.
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