200 killed in Somalia as fighting continues
Apr 22, 2007 - 8:57:41 PM
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The Islamists, who ruled most of the country for the last half of 2006, brought some stability to the lawless nation, but that was disrupted by an Ethiopian-backed and US-blessed assault by the transitional government over the New Year.
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By DPA,
[RxPG] Mogadishu/Nairobi, April 22 - At least 200 people have been killed in five days of fighting in the Somali capital Mogadishu, reports said Sunday.
Corpses remained strewn in the streets, many of them decapitated and decomposing, and the sounds of gun battles and mortar shelling rocked the seaside capital, just days after the UN warned of a looming humanitarian crisis.
At least 500 people have been wounded in this week's flare-up.
'My brother was on his cell phone talking with me. He and other people were trying to leave the village as two rockets landed at their place. They are all dead,' Ahmed Ulusow, a father of six, told Somali news agency Shabelle.
'The number of people who were wounded by stray bullets and explosions of rockets are increasingly being admitted and the hospital is overwhelmingly full because there are more patients than the hospital can manage,' director of Medina hospital Dahir Dhere told journalists.
More than 320,000 Mogadishu residents have fled the capital, according to the UN's refugee agency UNHCR, effectively emptying the city of one third of its estimated 1 million people.
A similar few days of fighting earlier in April left up to 1,000 people killed and was labelled the worst fighting in 15 years by aid agencies.
Somalia has been without effective central rule since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohammed Siad Barre by warlords, which plunged the country into anarchy.
The Islamists, who ruled most of the country for the last half of 2006, brought some stability to the lawless nation, but that was disrupted by an Ethiopian-backed and US-blessed assault by the transitional government over the New Year.
The government has struggled to assert its authority over the Horn of Africa nation and a 1,500-member African Union peacekeeping force deployed in Mogadishu has failed to stem the bloodshed.
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