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Ethiopia Presses Military Offensive Into Somalia    [

    Ethiopia Hits Somalia Airports
    By Jeffrey Gettleman
    The International Herald Tribune

    Monday 25 December 2006

    Nairobi - An Ethiopian fighter jet strafed Mogadishu's airport Monday in a show of force that took the growing conflict in the Horn of Africa to Somalia's capital for the first time.

    Four more Ethiopian fighter planes then attacked a second, intensely guarded military airport west of Mogadishu, witnesses said, where Islamist forces are said to store their heavy weapons and ammunition.

    Meanwhile, across the country, Somalia's Islamist leaders conceded that they were rapidly losing territory to the forces of Somalia's internationally recognized transitional government.

    In Beledweyne, a town near the Ethiopian border, residents resumed the lives they led before the Islamist regime, not even a day after the Islamist forces pulled out. A truck hauling qat, a mildly narcotic leaf that the Islamists had outlawed, pulled into the market to a burst of cheers.

    "It was wonderful to see that truck," said Farah Abdi Dereer, a vendor of spare parts.

    The fighting between Somalia's transitional government and the country's powerful Islamist movement, based in Mogadishu, has been raging on and off for nearly a week. On Sunday, Ethiopia joined the hostilities, bombing Islamist positions in several front-line areas and pushing ground troops deep into Somali territory.

    Ethiopian officials have said that they sided with the transitional government because the Islamists, whom American officials have accused of harboring Qaeda terrorists, posed a threat to the region.

    On Monday, witnesses in Mogadishu said, a lone Ethiopian fighter jet came roaring over the Indian Ocean around 9 a.m., fired machine guns at the parking lot of the international airport, which was mostly empty, and banked sharply away.

    The attack was apparently meant to be more a show of force than a destructive mission; the only reported casualty was an airport cleaning woman who was slightly wounded. It did, however, have the intended effect of shutting the airport down as Daallo Airlines, one of the last carriers to fly into Somalia, promptly canceled all service.

    Ethiopian officials said they were following specific instructions by the transitional government to seal Somalia's borders so no more foreign fighters could come in. According to United Nations officials, the Islamists are being supported by several thousand Eritreans, Libyans, Syrians and Yemenis who have responded to the call of a holy war against Ethiopia, a Christian- led country.

    In Baidoa, the inland seat of the transitional government, top officials were sounding increasingly confident. After months of isolation in a provincial market town, too weak to spread their administration to Somalia's cities, transitional government officials laid out an ambitious three-part plan.

    "We're going to eradicate the enemy, we're going to appoint administrators and we're going to rule nationwide," said Abdirizak Adam Hassan, chief of staff for President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed.

    A few weeks ago, this would have sounded preposterous. But the injection of forces from Ethiopia, which commands the most powerful military in the region, seems to be dynamically changing Somalia's wobbly balance of power.

    Still, with attacks and counterattacks continuing, the outcome remains far from certain. Western diplomats have cautioned Ethiopia not to try to overthrow the Islamists and occupy Mogadishu, fearing that would spawn a long, messy guerrilla war.

    Already, thousands of people, with barely enough to eat before the conflict started, are fleeing their homes and their farms, creating a worrisome situation for the few aid organizations still operating in Somalia.

    Ethiopian officials reiterated Monday that they felt they were forced to act because of the threat the Islamists posed to their security. Medhane Tadesse, an Ethiopian author who has written extensively on Somalia issues, said he believed the Ethiopian government was not planning a long campaign.

    "What they are trying to do is weaken the Islamists to the point where there can be a negotiated political settlement," he said. "If they stay too long, they will lose."

    So far, the Ethiopian military seems to be selecting targets mostly outside urban areas in an effort to reduce collateral damage.

    But the extent of the casualties is hard to tell. Warfare in Somalia is traditionally mobile and small-scale, fought between armed pickup trucks and small crews of fighters. Red Cross officials have said that they have treated more than 400 people for combat wounds, and United Nations officials put the death toll from the past week in the low hundreds.

    Both sides have published pictures of the dead sprawled on the battlefield. On Monday, the Islamists showed images of prisoners of war with their arms bound behind their backs and their throats slit. Last week, the Islamists vowed to execute all captives.

    Though the Islamist leaders conceded Monday that they retreated from two towns they had controlled - the transitional government said the true number was five - they seemed unbowed. Mosques in Mogadishu continued to blare out recruitment calls and thousands of young men, many in their early teens, continue to enlist.

    But some people in Mogadishu who used to support the Islamists - who did indeed bring a semblance of order to a very dangerous city - were beginning to express doubts.

    Asho Ali, a mother of eight, went to the hospital on Sunday to see her 16- year-old son, who had been wounded fighting for the Islamists. On Monday, he died.

    "For no reason we are losing our children," she said. "Why are they doing this?"

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    Ethiopia Presses Military Offensive Into Somalia
    By Mahad Ahmed Elmi
    McClatchy Newspapers

    Monday 25 December 2006

    Mogadishu, Somalia - Ethiopian troops seized towns throughout southern and central Somalia on Monday and bombed the international airport at Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, in a rapid escalation of a two-day-old offensive against Islamic fundamentalists who've controlled most of Somalia for the past six months.

    The better-armed Ethiopians encountered no resistance from fighters of the fundamentalist Council of Islamic Courts at Baladweyne, a strategic town on the main road from Ethiopia into central Somalia, and later seized Aadado after fighting there. Ethiopian troops and Somali militiamen reportedly were advancing toward Jowhar, an Islamic fundamentalist stronghold 50 miles north of Mogadishu.

    It's not clear, however, whether the Ethiopians intend to seize Jowhar or press their campaign to Mogadishu. Ethiopian officials said they've declared war on Somalia, and analysts said Ethiopian forces, equipped with tanks, heavy artillery and jet aircraft, would likely defeat the more lightly armed Islamic fighters in direct combat.

    But analysts said the Ethiopians would be unable to control Somalia's vast expanses for an extended period and that prolonged fighting would rally both Somalis and foreign fighters to the Islamic cause. They suggested that Ethiopia's likely goal is to force the Islamic Courts to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with Somalia's weak, but internationally recognized transitional government headquartered at Baidoa.

    "The goal is to break the court's military capacity and bring them back to the negotiating table from a position of weakness," said Matt Bryden, a consultant for the Belgium-based International Crisis Group, who's been monitoring the fighting from Nairobi, Kenya. "Neither side can win this conflict."

    Tension between Ethiopia, whose Christian-led government sees itself as a bulwark against the spread of radical Islam, and the Council of Islamic Courts has been building since June, when the CIC seized control of Mogadishu. The CIC quickly routed militia leaders who'd been receiving aid from the United States as part of a CIA-run counter-terrorism program and expanded its control to much of southern and central Somalia, where it imposed Islamic law.

    U.S. officials have charged that the CIC is sheltering al-Qaida figures believed responsible for attacks on Americans, though other diplomats and analysts have questioned the claims. U.S. officials have said they've urged restraint on Ethiopia, but analysts say the U.S. has signaled tacit approval of Ethiopian intervention through a series of recent actions, including a visit to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, by Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East.

    Somalia's transitional government has almost no military forces of its own and is dependent on Ethiopia for protection.

    On Sunday, Ethiopia, saying the CIC threatened its national security, acknowledged for the first time that it had thousands of troops inside Somalia and launched an offensive that included the bombing of four strategic towns in central and southern Somalia.

    On Monday, Ethiopian ground forces moved forward on multiple fronts.

    At Baladweyne, just a few miles from the Ethiopian border, Ethiopian troops encountered no resistance as they entered the town in the early morning, one day after Ethiopian planes had bombed what was described as a training camp for Islamic fighters. Within hours, according to residents of the town, several movie theaters that the CIC had ordered closed had reopened. A CIC ban on the sale and use of khat, a popular narcotic leaf that Somalis chew, also was lifted.

    The Ethiopian forces imposed a three-day curfew on the town, even though many residents reported relief that the fundamentalists had been driven out.

    Fierce fighting erupted in the districts of Daynuunay and Hiiran, northeast of Baidoa, where the two sides exchanged heavy artillery bombardments. Eyewitnesses said several fighters from both sides were killed, but there was no official word on casualties and no reliable way to determine their extent.

    Fighting was also reported at Iidaale in the south.

    In addition to the Mogadishu airport, Ethiopian planes bombed a CIC military airfield at Baledogle, 60 miles west of Mogadishu, and a bridge at Kalabayka in central Somalia, apparently in an effort to prevent Islamic forces from withdrawing toward the south and reinforcing positions closer to the capital.

    The bombing of the airport at Mogadishu came at about 9:30 a.m. when fighter jets dropped two bombs on the runway. The bombs killed a woman maintenance worker and damaged the runway, but did not prevent the arrival an hour later of the CIC's top two leaders, Sheikh Hassan Daahir Aweys and Sheikh Shariif Sheikh Ahmed.

    There was no official word on where the two officials had been, but rumors circulated that they'd spent the last two days in Eritrea, a bitter rival of Ethiopia and the CIC's principal backer. About 2,000 Eritrean troops are reported to be inside Somalia, but their role, if any, in the fighting was unclear.

    Hundreds of foreign fighters, primarily from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Asian peninsula, reportedly have arrived in recent days to bolster the CIC. Bryden said he'd received reports that many of those fighters were involved in fighting near Baidoa.

    Bryden also said he was concerned that the bombing of the airport at Mogadishu would encourage the CIC, which has no aircraft at its disposal, to seek ways of bombing targets in Addis Ababa and to stir up religious tensions between Ethiopia's Christians and its Muslims, who make up about 50 percent of the country's population.

    "From the perspective of the courts, bombing the Somali capital probably legitimizes bombing the enemy capital," Bryden said. "Whether you deliver it by air or by more primitive means is not the issue."

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    McClatchy correspondent Mark Seibel contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.