Somalia PM: Major fighting is over
Somalia’s prime minister today said he does not expect any more major fighting against rival Islamic fighters and his Ethiopian military backer described the operation as within weeks of being completed.
With attention shifting to suspected al-Qaida fighters believed to be sheltered by the hard-line group, a security official in neighbouring Kenya said 10 foreigners who had fought with Somalia’s Islamic movement had been captured there and told interrogators that the militia had been doomed by internal rifts.
Government forces, backed by Ethiopian troops, were pursuing the remnants of an Islamic militia that until two weeks ago controlled most of southern Somalia.
Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi said some of the militiamen offered to surrender today.
“We asked our troops to collect them and bring them back home,” he said, refusing to provide any details about how many fighters were involved or where they were.
The rest of the “Islamists are scattered in the bush”, he said. “Maybe small fights can take place, but we are trying to destroy them.”
In the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told his parliament his troops were not peacekeepers and it would be too costly to keep them in Somalia for much longer, calling on the international community to act quickly to send in peacekeepers to avoid a vacuum.
Withdrawing will not mean abandoning “the Somali government and its people’s ongoing effort to stabilise peace in the country”, Meles said. “We will stay in Somalia for a few weeks, maybe for two weeks.”
Diplomats from the region were working to arrange the speedy deployment of African peacekeepers to help the transitional government establish its authority in the country, which has known only anarchy for 15 years.
Somalia’s transitional government and its Ethiopian allies have long accused Islamic militias of harbouring al-Qaida, and foreign Islamic radicals, including Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens, are believed to have come to Somalia to fight on behalf of the Islamic movement in recent months.
In addition, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his top deputy Ayman al-Zawahri have issued statements making clear they see Somalia as a battleground in their global war on the West.
Three suspects wanted by the US in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in east Africa are believed to be leaders of the Somali Islamic movement.
Islamic movement leaders deny having any links to al-Qaida.
Sea routes from southern Somalia were being patrolled by the US navy.
Neighbouring Kenya, which supports the Somali government, deployed troops, armoured vehicles and trucks with light weapons along its 400-mile border with Somalia following reports that Somali Islamists fleeing fighting were on the Kenyan frontier, officials said today.
A US counterterrorism task force has trained new coast guards and recently gave Kenya three patrol boats.
Anthony Kibuchi, the Kenyan provincial police commander on the border, yesterday said 10 foreigners were arrested on Saturday when they tried to cross into Kenya.
A security official today said the foreigners were fighters with Somalia’s Council of Islamic Courts and told interrogators that the Islamic militia collapsed because of internal disagreements.
The official said one of the foreigners arrested was identified as Bashir Ali Makhtar, a member of Ethiopian rebel group the Ogaden National Liberation Front. The official said that Makhtar holds a Canadian passport.
Four of the people arrested are Kenyans or Somalis recruited into the Islamic militia and three of them Eritreans, including an army colonel, the official said in the north-eastern town of Garissa. He did not give details about the other two foreigners arrested on Saturday.
According to a UN report, Eritrea, Ethiopia’s long-time rival, sent 2,000 troops to support the Islamic movement.
The intervention of Ethiopia saw a military advance that was a stunning turnaround for Somalia’s government. Just weeks ago the government could barely control one town, its base of Baidoa, while the Council of Islamic Courts controlled the capital and much of southern Somalia.
The Islamic movement’s casualties run into the thousands, Ethiopia said.
Gedi, the prime minister, said that the airport and the seaport in Mogadishu would reopen tomorrow to humanitarian agencies and that private operators could request clearance from the government to use them as well.
A three-day period began today for Somalis to voluntarily surrender their arms to government-designated points. Ethiopian troops reported that at one such point in the capital, Mogadishu, no one had handed in any weapons in the morning.
Abdirahman Mudey, a spokesman of the Council of Islamic Courts, insisted today that any power the government wielded was thanks to its Ethiopian backers. He predicted a return of the chaotic and violent warlord era that Mogadishu knew before his Islamic movement’s brief rule.
“Somalia is under the occupation of the Ethiopians,” Mudey said.
