At least 52 people were killed and 120 wounded in heavy fighting on Saturday in the Somali capital, a human-rights group and hospital officials said.
Fighting between Islamic insurgents and Ethiopian troops backing the government had stopped overnight, but both sides were again battling by Saturday morning. Hundreds of people fled the violence on foot and piling into trucks and hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties.
Somalia's Elman Human Rights Organization said Mogadishu residents, hospital workers and human rights workers told it that at least 52 civilians had been killed and many wounded on Saturday.
PHOTO: EPA
Several hospital sources said they had received at least 120 wounded from Saturday's fighting. They spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
The new tallies brought the death toll in four days of fighting in Mogadishu to at least 165 people and more than 229 wounded, the human rights group said.
Saturday's violence was the worst in recent years, said Sudan Ali Ahmed, the chairman of the decade-old Elman Human Rights Organization.
"I call on the both sides to stop the fighting and shelling without any condition," to save civilian lives, Ahmed said by telephone.
The UN refugee agency said that 321,000 people have fled Mogadishu since February because of the violence.
Ethiopian troops fired mortar shells from the presidential palace in the direction of northern Mogadishu, the main battlefield between the two sides.
Local radio stations reported that the insurgents and Ethiopians had engaged in street battles mainly in the capital's southern and northern districts.
One station, HornAfrik, was hit by a mortar and went off the air. A reporter and a technician were injured, said Abdullahi Kulmiye, a colleague of theirs.
Hundreds of women, children and men walked or got onto trucks to flee to safer parts of Mogadishu, such as its northern outskirts, or to leave the city altogether for southern or central towns.
Those traveling on foot carried on their heads cooking utensils, bedding and clothes wrapped in sheets. Some looked weak and said they had not eaten for days.
"I prefer to flee my home to a safe place to avoid the shelling," said a mother of eight who only gave her name as Faduma.
She said she had not eaten for two days and that during March battles between the insurgents and Ethiopians, her husband and firstborn daughter were killed.
"It is better to die in a safe place hungry and thirsty than to wait for mortar shells," said Faduma, whose home is in the northern Mogadishu area of Kungal, a known insurgent base and the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in recent days.
Dahir Dhere, director of Medina hospital, said his hospital had more wounded than it could handle and they had set up tents outside to accommodate the increasing number of injured people arriving.
On Saturday, US Ambassador to Kenya Michael Ranneberger said it would be wrong to describe the recent bloodshed in Mogadishu as a full-blown Islamic insurgency.
Ranneberger, whose mandate also includes Somalia, said the violence has not been organized and was carried out by clan rivals and remnants of an ousted Islamic movement that has threatened an Iraq-style insurgency.
"They are trying to create an insurgency," Ranneberger said in Kenya. "But at this point it's opportunistic violence. They're not organized like an insurgency."
Somali troops, assisted by Ethiopian forces, ousted the Council of Islamic Courts from Mogadishu and other strongholds in December. Since then the capital has seen of waves of violence. The most deadly began late last month and saw hundreds of people killed, most of them civilians.
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