SOMALIA:The Somali capital, Mogadishu, suffered some of the heaviest bombardment in nine days of fighting yesterday as Ethiopian tanks supporting the interim government shelled new areas of the city, despite a claim by the Somali prime minister to have routed Islamist insurgents.
The Ethiopian assault has killed several hundred people, many of them civilians hit by indiscriminate shelling that has destroyed homes and shops and forced tens of thousands to flee Mogadishu as it spread to previously relatively peaceful parts of the city.
More than 1,000 people were killed in an earlier round of fighting last month. More than a third of the civilian population - some 340,000 people - have fled in the past three months.
The UN humanitarian affairs chief, John Holmes, yesterday accused all those involved of war crimes.
"The rules of humanitarian law are being flouted by all sides . . . all factions are equally guilty of indiscriminate violence in a civilian area," he said. "Civilians in Mogadishu are paying an intolerable price for the absence of political progress and dialogue and the failure of all parties to abide by the rules of warfare."
The interim Somali government said the 20,000-strong Ethiopian force fighting on its behalf, with 5,000 Somali troops playing a lesser role, will keep up the offensive until fighters with the Council of Islamic Courts are defeated.
The council ruled Mogadishu and much of southern Somalia for six months last year until overthrown by the Ethiopian army with US backing.
Somalia's prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, yesterday claimed to have defeated the Islamist forces. "We have won the fighting against the insurgents," he told Associated Press.
The Islamic Courts government was popular in Mogadishu after bringing relative order and driving out clan warlords responsible for 16 years of death and mayhem. But the US believed it looked too much like the Taliban, with its ban on music and dancing and the narcotic qat, and that it was sympathetic to al-Qaeda. - ( Guardian service)