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Ethiopia Finds Itself Ensnared in Somalia
Troops patrol Mogadishu on a truck with an antiaircraft gun. The Somali premier declared heavy fighting over yesterday, even as explosions continued.
(By Mohamed Abdulle Hassan Siidi -- Associated Press)
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It was also always fundamentally a Hawiye movement, and Somalis tend to be loyal to clan above all.
Ethiopia and the United States made a mistake, Tadesse and other critics say, by throwing their support entirely behind the transitional government in the name of fighting a terrorist threat that involved just a few individuals, and at the expense of alienating the Hawiye.
This month, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer flew to Somalia in a show of U.S. support for Yusuf's government, a move that further infuriated Hawiye leaders.
Frazer has expressed "concern" for civilians but has offered no public criticism of the transitional government or of Ethiopia for using attack helicopters and other heavy weapons against civilian neighborhoods that have been reduced to ruins.
In his news conference Thursday, the Somali prime minister, Gedi, invited more than 300,000 residents who have fled the city in recent weeks to return to the broken seaside capital, where certain neighborhoods have lately acquired new nicknames.
In an allusion to sectarian violence engulfing Baghdad, residents now call the north part of the city Shiite and the south Sunni.
Gedi said that most of the fighting had ended and that Ethiopian and Somali government troops were merely clearing out the remaining "pockets" of resistance.
But Mohamud Uluso, a prominent leader of a Hawiye sub-clan called the Ayr, said that despite Gedi's declaration, fighting will most likely continue.
"What is worrying for Somalis and the international community now is the possibility of what happened in Iraq," he said. "The fighting was under the control of the Hawiye leadership committee, but once that control disintegrates, then there will be underground leadership. You don't know who or where they are."
Special correspondent Mohamed Ibrahim in Mogadishu contributed to this report.
