Fighting in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu killed at least 12 people and wounded 17 others after Islamist insurgents attacked government forces and African Union (AU) peacekeepers today.
The rebels launched overnight raids on bases around the city’s strategic K4 junction, triggering gun battles and barrages of mortar shells that made residents cower indoors.
President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed’s fragile UN-backed administration is facing a concerted campaign by insurgents who hit the AU’s main military base in Mogadishu with twin suicide car bombs last Thursday, killing 17 peacekeepers.
With its credibility increasingly in doubt, the government said it was planning a fresh offensive against the rebels but the guerrillas appeared to have attacked first.
Witnesses said AU troops later fired shells at the capital’s sprawling Bakara Market, which has long been an insurgent stronghold.
“I saw three dead bodies in the street by Bakara,” one resident, Abdifarah Hassan, told Reuters. “Another died later.”
Ambulance service coordinator Ali Musa said at least eight other corpses had been collected since the start of the clashes, and that at least 17 civilians had also been wounded.
Western security agencies say the failed Horn of Africa state which has been torn by civil war for the past 18 years has become a haven for militants including foreign jihadists, who are using it to plot attacks in the region and beyond.
Fighting has killed more than 18 000 Somalis since the start of 2007 and driven another 1.5 million from their homes.
The al Shabaab rebel group, which Washington says is al Qaeda’s proxy in Somalia, said last week’s attack on the AU mission AMISOM was in revenge for the US killing of a senior al Qaeda suspect days earlier in rebel-held southern Somalia.
Today, a senior government official accused al Shabaab fighters of plundering an industrial training centre in the north of the capital after forcing its staff to flee.
“They have looted all the equipment from the workshops, and the generators,” said the state minister for defence, Sheikh Yusuf Mohamed Siad, a former warlord also known as “Inda’ade”.
A staff member at the institute, which was set up in part with German funding, confirmed the minister’s account and told Reuters he and his colleagues had run away at gunpoint.
Pic: Somali insurgents
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