By MOHAMED OLAD HASSAN
Monday, March 12, 2007
About 20 heavily armed men engaged in a 15-minute gunbattle with Ethiopian troops at the defense ministry late Sunday before they disappeared, said eyewitness Khalif Dahir, who lives near the base.
The boy, who was sitting in front of his house, was hit in the head by a bullet. The woman was fatally shot while traveling in a truck, witnesses said.
Sunday night's gunbattle came only hours after Somalia's deputy defense minister said that his troops are ready to fill a "power vacuum" in the restive capital, Mogadishu, with the help of African Union peacekeepers.
"We will target the terrorists and will not let any more guns terrorize people," Deputy Defense Minister Salad Ali Jelle said.
"Thousands of our troops ... are ready to fill the power vacuum in the city from the streets to house to house," he said.
Somalia's government and troops from neighboring Ethiopia drove out a radical Islamic movement late last year, but the government is now struggling with a growing insurgency and the Ethiopians want to pull out.
African Union peacekeepers began to arrive in Mogadishu on Tuesday, the first peacekeepers to come here in more than a decade. Two peacekeepers were wounded when insurgents attacked their convoy.
The peacekeepers, all from Uganda, are the vanguard of a larger force authorized by the United Nations to help the government assert its authority and to allow Ethiopian forces to leave. Insurgents believed to be the remnants of the Council of Islamic Courts have staged almost daily attacks against the government, its armed forces and the Ethiopians.
Somalia descended into chaos in 1991, when warlords overthrew a dictator, carved the capital into armed, clan-based camps, and left most of the rest of the country ungoverned. The transitional government was formed in 2004 with U.N. help, but has struggled to assert control.
Source: AP, Mar 12, 2007