Heavy fighting between Islamic militia and gunmen supporting a US-backed alliance subsided yesterday as calls for an end to the week-long bloodletting intensified, witnesses and officials said.
Although no official truce had been reached between the rival fighters, clan elders and religious leaders had called on the warriors to end the bloody skirmishes that have thus far claimed 111 lives since last Sunday.
"The violence has susbsided after a ceasefire call by the prominent personalities," said Mohamed Muyhaydin, a resident of the Sisi district north of the capital Mogadishu, the center of the pitched battles.
"No ceasefire has been agreed by the warring sides, but it seems that they are giving attention to the mounting criticism of the violence in Mogadishu," Muyhaydin added.
Meanwhile, Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed warned government ministers involved in the fighting that they would be excluded from power if they continued with the skirmishes.
Some members of Yusuf's largely powerless government that sits in the town of Baidoa, around 250km west of the capital, are also members of the US-backed Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT) that has been fighting with the influential Union of Islamic courts.
"The president declared [that] ministers involved in the violence in Mogadishu could no longer be in the Cabinet of the Somali transitional government," Information Minister Mohamed Mohamed Abdi Hayir said.
The ARPCT alliance has vowed to curb the power of the courts, that have gained popular backing by restoring some stability to areas in Mogadishu through the imposition of Shariah law.
It also accuses the courts of harboring terrorists and training foreign fighters on Somali soil, charges that Islamic leaders deny.
The lull in fighting yesterday came after warlords on Saturday deployed hundreds of fighters in Mogadishu to battle their Islamic rivals.
Two regional warlords joined their US-backed colleagues in the capital, deploying heavily-armed militiamen to stoke fierce urban fighting that spilled from its initial confines in northern Mogadishu to the south.
Alarmed, Somalia's powerless transitional government asked Western powers to squeeze a truce from the ARPCT and the Union of Islamic courts.
There were also direct appeals to groups involved in the fighting.
"I am appealing and begging the warring sides in Mogadishu to show a sense of humanity and stop the war," influential Somali parliament speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden told reporters in Nairobi.
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