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| Africa Horn | |
| Mogadishu on edge for renewed fighting | |
| 2006-05-27 | |
With no truce signed despite increasingly desperate calls from the international community and locals, elders continued to shuttle between the rival camps to press for a ceasefire. Yet there was little confidence the lull would last and columns of frightened civilians poured out of residential districts in southern and northern Magodishu, witnesses said. "There were large movements of militiamen overnight," said Mumi Ibrahim, a resident of the southern K4 neighbourhood, where the most intense clashes took place. "They are preparing for another round. "If they don't start fighting today, they will start tomorrow, but definitely there is no peace at the moment," he told AFP. "People are very much disturbed," said K4 resident Abdullahi Hassan Osoble. "They are fleeing from one place to another, unable to know which is safer. The most affected are those from children and the elderly." Another K4 resident, Ismaic Haji Roble, said the two sides had spent the night lobbing shells at each other and trading bursts of gunfire in K4 but there were no immediate reports of casualties. "Mortar shelling and sporadic gunfire have been going on in K4 overnight," he said. Tension was also high in the southern Daynile neighbourhood and the Galgalato and Sisi areas in north Mogadishu, all of which were battlegrounds 24 hours earlier, residents said. Thursday's clashes erupted after a tense weeklong lull in fighting that began in Sisi on May 7, killing more than 140 people over the following eight days before the two sides began observing a tenuous unsigned ceasefire. Those clashes, the third major battle between the Islamists and the warlords since February, brought the death toll to more than 240 in the deadliest violence Mogadishu has seen since Somalia collapsed into anarchy in 1991. | |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |