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MOGADISHU - Ethiopian and Somali troops used tanks and helicopters to launch a major offensive against insurgents in Mogadishu today, triggering battles that killed more than two dozen people.
With scenes of carnage shocking even by Somali standards, residents said the final death toll from the worst day of fighting since a war over the New Year could be much higher.
"People are worried, they did not know whether they will survive today or not," said Osman Gabayre, a local journalist who saw five dead civilians on the streets and the wreck of an Ethiopian army lorry hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.
"I saw the remains of 17 Ethiopian soldiers there," he said.
Mobs tied ropes to some of the dead soldiers and dragged them through the streets.
Several Ethiopian helicopter gunships fired rockets in the first use of aerial power in the city during the last few months' increasingly vicious fighting. Aid workers said at least 100 wounded people were admitted to its two main hospitals.
"Patients are coming to us by the minute, it is too much," one harried doctor at Madina hospital told Reuters by telephone. He said three people died there, including a 10-year-old boy.
Government and Ethiopian forces are pitted against Islamists ousted from Mogadishu over the New Year and disgruntled clan militia who used to run the lawless coastal city.
Amid the chaos, one mortar crashed into a mosque, killing a baby boy and beheading another teenage boy.
"My children sought refuge at a mosque when it was hit by a mortar shell. My son died and my daughter lost the toes on one of her feet," local policeman Hashim Hussein told Reuters, his voice cracking with emotion.
Another mortar hit a fuel tank, witnesses said, sparking a huge blaze that engulfed a local watchman and lorry owner.
Breaking a rocky cease-fire in place since the weekend, the Ethiopian and Somali government soldiers launched attacks from early morning on insurgents' strongholds in the Ramadan area of north Mogadishu, around the main football stadium, and elsewhere.
Truce over
"I have not seen anything like this," said one terrified resident, Hussein Haji. "Whenever the Ethiopians fire their big guns, all my windows and doors are shaking."
Reuters journalists, trapped in their buildings by the fighting, saw helicopters firing and thick smoke rising as explosions and gunfire reverberated across the city.
"Early in the morning, the government troops and Ethiopians attacked us," said one Islamist source involved in the fighting.
The Ethiopians had brokered the truce at the weekend with Mogadishu's dominant Hawiye clan after a week that saw at least two dozen people killed, dead soldiers dragged through streets and burnt, and a plane crash probably caused by a missile.
A Hawiye leader and spokesman told the local Shabelle broadcaster the negotiations had been a sham.
"We know this fighting was planned earlier and we have been deceived," Ahmed Diriye Diriye was quoted as saying.
Shabelle said two Ethiopian tanks were destroyed.
The fighting was the worst since the war to kick out the Islamists and install President Abdullahi Yusuf's interim government in the capital.
His administration is the 14th attempt at restoring central rule since the 1991 ouster of a military dictator.
The African Union (AU) has sent 1,200 Ugandan troops to help pacify Somalia. But they have also been attacked in a nation that defied a U.N.-US peacekeeping mission in the early 1990s.
Other African nations are balking at sending further troops needed to boost the AU force to its planned strength of 8,000.
The United Nations said 57,000 people had fled Mogadishu since February, including 12,000 last week alone.
- REUTERS
