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Somalia: Scores dead as Ethiopian troops push further into Mogadishu

by wsws (reposted)
Thursday, May 1, 2008 :An upsurge in fighting in the Somali capital Mogadishu left scores dead and more than 200 wounded, as mortars and machine-gun fire rocked the city. Weeks of indiscriminate shelling have reduced the once thriving capital to rubble, with Bakara marketthe citys centre of commercealmost flattened.
The recent fighting, in the districts of Wardhigley, Heliwa, Wahara Ade and Yaqshid, was started when Ethiopian troops, which prop up the government, moved from their base at a factory in Yaqshid and tried to enter areas not previously under their control. Hundreds of families fled and bodies remained rotting on the streets.

The casualties...were caused by Ethiopians using heavy artillery and tank shells in residential areas of the war-torn capital. We condemn this latest fighting, said Sudan Ali Ahmed, chairman of a local NGO, Elman Human Rights.

What we have seen on Saturday and Sunday [April 19-20] was the worst fighting ever, said Asha Shaur, a civil society spokeswoman. It was the most intense and destructive the city has experienced.

Shaur appealed to both sides of the conflict to spare the civilian population. The indiscriminate use of heavy weapons in populated areas has one aim onlyto kill as many people as possible, whether armed or unarmed, she said. Many of the newly displaced were more often than not people who had returned from camps ahead of the expected rainy season, explained Shaur. They wanted to shelter in their homes before the rains.

The violence has swelled an already huge internal refugee problem, with the United Nations World Food Programme already feeding about 1.5 million people, and the International Committee of the Red Cross and the aid group CARE feeding many others.

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