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By Sahal Abdulle
04 January 2007
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Somali gunmen attacked an oil tanker truck near Mogadishu on Thursday, wounding three people and raising fears of a return to the clan-based violence that had largely stopped during six months of Islamist rule.
The Somalia Islamic Courts Council (SICC), which imposed strict sharia law across much of the south, fled the capital a week ago in the face of advancing government troops backed by heavily armed Ethiopian forces.
Within hours of their departure, militia loyal to various warlords reappeared at scores of checkpoints in the city where they used to rob, rape and murder civilians.
"The militia fired three RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades). One of them hit us," the truck driver, who gave his name as Tusbah, told Reuters at the scene, where the charred wreckage of his vehicle lay strewn across a sandy road.
"They were bandits who wanted money," he said. Dozens of passengers riding on top of the truck had fled as the gunmen fired automatic rifles before targeting it with grenades.
Analysts say the rapid return of warlords showed how easily Mogadishu could slide back into the anarchy it has suffered since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991.
The attack in Galgalato, 25 km (15 miles) north of the city center, came on the last day of a three-day deadline declared by the interim government for Mogadishu residents and militia to hand in their guns or be disarmed by force.
But few have been turned in, as locals in one of the world's most dangerous cities waited to see if the government could restore the relative stability they experienced under the Islamists.
DIPLOMATIC PUSH
Interim government troops backed by Ethiopian armor and aircraft hunted Islamist fighters who fled their last stronghold in the southern port of Kismayu on Monday following a two-week war. The Islamists vowed to fight on.
"Our troops went toward the Kenyan border to get those terrorists," a senior government security official in Kismayu, Abdullahi Sheikh Ismail, told Reuters.
On the Kenyan side of the border, a local police chief said troops would "crack down" on any Islamists who tried to cross, while the United States deployed warships off the Somali coast.
The interim government wants an international peacekeeping force -- approved
by the
U.N. Security Council before the war -- to be deployed immediately to help
it restore stability and let Ethiopian forces withdraw.
Uganda has provisionally offered a battalion, and its President Yoweri Museveni was due to meet his Ethiopian counterpart Meles Zenawi in Addis Ababa on Thursday.
Kenya was due to host a meeting of the U.S.-backed International Contact Group on Somalia on Friday, two days after it met in Brussels to push for peace talks.
The biggest obstacle facing the interim government, experts say, is the perception that it is a puppet of Addis Ababa installed by the Ethiopian military.
Feeding on this animosity, the SICC and some foreign fighters may launch an Iraqi-style insurgency against a government they say is propped up by a hated, Christian "occupier," the experts say.
(Additional reporting by Guled Mohamed in Mogadishu, Sahra Abdi in Kismayu, and Noor Ali in Garissa)
Source: www.reuters.com