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04 January 2007
MOGADISHU (AFP) - Somali government forces and Ethiopian troops have stepped up efforts to find Islamist leaders driven out of their urban strongholds in Somalia, with US naval forces helping in the search.
In Mogadishu, Deputy Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Aidid said Thursday about 3,000 Islamist fighters were still holed up in the capital and urged them to join the army, warning that they would not get a second chance.
Aidid is the warlord son of one of the powerful clan faction leaders who had carved up the Horn of Africa nation since the fall in 1991 of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
He also claimed 12,000 Ethiopian troops were backing the transitional government, which is three times as many as Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has said.
US naval forces, based in the tiny but strategic nation of Djibouti on the border with Somalia and Ethiopia, have joined the hunt for Islamist militants who are accused of Al-Qaeda ties, US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Wednesday.
Kenya meanwhile closed its own border with Somalia to prevent gunmen slippin into the country with genuine refugees from the heavy fighting that erupted when the Ethiopians went into action alongside government forces on December 20.
McCormack said US forces from Djibouti were patrolling the Indian Ocean coast off Somalia to help track leaders of the Union of Islamic Courts, which had seized Mogadishu from warlords in June and extended its hold over other towns in the country.
Washington was working closely with Somalia's neighbours "to ensure that these individuals aren't able to transit those borders," McCormack said, while giving no details of the military deployment.
The US government has previously charged that suspected Al-Qaeda agents wanted for the 1998 bombings of US embassies in East Africa could have found refuge with the Islamists.
"We know there are about 3,000 Islamist fighters with their guns inside the capital, but we are trying hard to deal with this matter," Aidid told a press conference in Mogadishu.
Aidid toned down a threat Monday from Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi forcibly to disarm residents if they failed to surrender weapons by Thursday night.
"There is no policy to use force in Somalia ... in disarmament," Aidid said, after only 18 weapons were reported handed in by Wednesday in a war-shattered city where the law of the gun became so strong that some fighters laughed off the idea of giving them up.
"The three-day deadline for people to surrender weapons basically means the government wanted the exercise to be done soon," Aidid said.
There has been no firm word for days of Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys and his fellow Islamist leaders, who had rallied Mogadishu crowds in calling for a "holy war" against the Ethiopians they presented as invasion forces in league with the government.
However, the fleeing Islamist leaders were reported to be in Badade district in the Lower Juba region of Somalia, after giving up bids to sneak into Kenya, according to Somali government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari.
A top Kenyan official said four Ethiopian helicopters which struck positions three kilometres (1.8 miles) inside Kenya, "nearly hit three off-road vehicles we strongly believed to be carrying the Islamist leaders."
The vehicles "were being trailed by a US satellite and all indications are that the (Islamists) were inside," said the official, asking not to be named and citing intelligence reports.
In closing the border, Kenyan police prevented aid workers from reaching refugee reception centres and have forcefully escorted at least 700 people in northern and coastal regions back over the border to Somalia, drawing protests from the UN refugee agency.
Police also said a Kenyan military helicopter was "extensively damaged" after it came under sustained ground fire while patrolling the border with Somalia, hours after the border was closed.
