Heavy weapons fire broke out before dawn yesterday in the Somali capital Mogadishu, which is experiencing its worst fighting in 15 years.
After a brief lull since nightfall, detonations could be heard again at 2.30am as the Ethiopian army pressed its land and air offensive against insurgents for the third consecutive day.
"We don't know where to go. We are trapped in our houses and dead bodies are lying in the street," a resident in the southern Ali Kamin area, Ibrahim Duale told reporters.
"There is no chance of taking the wounded and dead people because of the heavy artillery and anti-aircraft weapons. It is still continuing and we cannot tell exactly the number of dead. I have seen at least seven bodies and they all lived in the neighborhood," he said.
Buildings have sustained heavy damage in the onslaught.
"The whole area is demolished, totally demolished," another despairing resident, Ali Hasan, said. "You can see smoke coming out of everywhere and people are confused. They don't have anywhere to run."
Fighting intensified on Friday as rebels shot down an Ethiopian helicopter gunship, killing the crew.
The Ethiopian government said late on Friday its army had killed more than 200 insurgents in Mogadishu since launching its offensive to support the struggling Somali government.
The death toll was the highest since the start of the year, when Ethiopian forces helped the Somali transitional government drive out the leaders of the Islamist movement controlling Mogadishu.
The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross deplored the high number of civilian casualties and described the fighting as the worst in more than 15 years.
The downing of the helicopter and the dragging of dead soldiers through the streets this past week carried dark echoes of a failed UN-backed US peace operation in Somalia in the early 1990s.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion