Ethiopians Help Seize Somali Capital

With a major battle for Mogadishu averted, clan elders met on the outskirts of the city with Ali Mohamed Gedi, prime minister of the transitional government, the latest of more than a dozen groups to attempt to establish control of the nation in recent years. Analysts said that to succeed, Gedi would need a consensus of clan leaders, including some of the more moderate remnants of the Islamic forces.

"People I think will accept this mainly from being tired and fed up," said Omar Jamal of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, Minn., who keeps in close contact with many Somalis in Mogadishu. "The government, at least in the first phase, will be accepted with open and welcoming arms."

Somalia has had no viable central government since 1991, when a coalition of clan-based warlords overthrew President Mohamed Siad Barre, then quickly turned to battling each other, devastating the capital and many other towns. U.N.-backed interventions by U.S. and other foreign forces ended in 1995, turning the country back to the warlords.

Guns were plentiful, rape and murder endemic. Prominent international terrorists, including, according to U.S. officials, men responsible for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, found haven in the capital.

The Islamic Courts movement was founded in the 1990s as a collection of clan-based courts imposing Islamic law. It was broadly welcomed among Mogadishu's people when its militias took control of the capital in June.

Guns mostly disappeared from the streets, and crimes were prosecuted for the first time in years. Clan elders and prominent business leaders supported the group because it brought stability to one of the world's most lawless cities.

The Islamic leaders showed little interest in cooperating with the United States or other Western countries in fighting terrorism. There were persistent reports that Arab fighters were arriving in large numbers in Mogadishu, heeding a call in July by Osama bin Laden to make Somalia a battleground of global jihad.

The severe moral tone of the Islamic movement gradually cost it support in Mogadishu, which historically was more relaxed than many Muslim cities. Somali women complained of new pressure to veil their faces, and formerly beardless men stopped shaving and cut their hair short.

After taking over Mogadishu in June, militia units of the Islamic movement swept across southern Somalia, establishing control of town after town, including the port of Kismaayo. The Puntland and Somaliland regions to the north, however, remained semi-independent, as they have been for years.

The advances ended this weekend with the drive by Ethiopian forces. Massive casualties inflicted on the Islamic fighters helped further erode their support, analysts said.

"They got decimated, and families are very unhappy in Mogadishu," said Ken Menkhaus, a Davidson College political science professor who specializes in Somalia, speaking from Charlotte, N.C. "The extent of the losses almost certainly caused a lot of dissent in Mogadishu."

Ethiopian officials said they intend to pull their forces out after several weeks and turn over security in southern Somalia to an international force provided by member states of the African Union.

But analysts said the Islamic forces, though dispersed and driven from their stronghold in Mogadishu, remain powerful, both politically and as a possible guerrilla force.

"This is the low point for the Islamists, but they are not gone," Menkhaus said. "It could get a whole lot worse if it turns into a low-intensity terrorist war."