Somalia: heavy fighting south of Bidoa

MOGADISHU, Dec 8, 2006 (AFP) - Fierce fighting erupted Friday between forces loyal to Somalia's weak Ethiopian-backed government and powerful Islamists south of the government's seat of Baidoa, Islamist officials said.

"Heavy fighting has begun in the Dinsoor area," Sheikh Sharif Sheik Ahmed, head of the executive wing of the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS), told a large crowd in the capital after Friday prayers. He said the clashes began when a joint Somali government-Ethiopian force attacked Islamist fighters around Dinsoor, about 110 kilometers (70 miles) south of Baidoa, the only town held by the transitional government.

"Our forces have been raided by Ethiopian troops, so people get up and fight against the Ethiopians," Ahmed said, urging Somalis to join a holy war against Ethiopian troops and opposing a UN-authorized peacekeeping mission. "Stand up and defeat the enemies who have invaded our land," he told several hundred people who had gathered to protest the UN Security Council's adoption on Wednesday of a resolution authorizing regional peacekeepers for Somalia. The government's deputy defense minister, Salat Ali Jelle, said he was unable to contact his forces on the ground around Dinsoor, which the administration claimed to have re-taken from the Islamists earlier this week. "I cannot confirm or deny the claims from the Islamic courts because the area is out of communication," he told AFP by phone from Baidoa. Residents of Dinsoor could not immediately be reached for comment on the reported battle, but an Islamist commander in Somali's Bay region, where both Dinsoor and Baidoa are located, said the fighting was fierce. "I don't have the exact toll, but I am told many people have died," the commander, Sheikh Mohamed Ibrahim Bilal, told AFP. "Our Islamic fighters were attacked by a combined force of Ethiopian troops and government militia."

The reports of fighting in Dinsoor came after Islamist fighters and forces loyal to the pro-government administration of the northeastern enclave of Puntland traded heavy artillery fire in central Somalia. The developments pitched the lawless nation closer to all-out war that many fear could spread throughout the Horn of Africa, drawing in Ethiopia and its arch-foe Eritrea, which is accused of backing the Islamists. Copyright (c) 2006 Agence France-Presse

Received by NewsEdge Insight: 12/08/2006 08:54:55