Ethiopian Aircraft Bomb Somali Towns In Escalating Conflict

Troops Hit Islamic Forces on Four Fronts

Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post , 25 December

LONDON, Dec. 24 -- Ethiopian troops attacked Somalia's Islamic Courts movement on four fronts, Ethiopian officials said Sunday, with jets bombing several towns in a significant escalation of fighting that threatens to spill across the Horn of Africa.

It was the first time the Ethiopian government had acknowledged having troops in Somalia to protect the interim Somali government against the Islamic movement, which has taken over most of the southern part of the country, including the capital, Mogadishu. The United Nations had estimated that at least 8,000 Ethiopian troops were in Somalia, but Ethiopia previously said it had only a few hundred military trainers there.

As he has previously stated, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi announced on a televised broadcast that his country was at war with the Islamic Courts.

"Our defense force has been forced to enter a war to defend (against) the attacks from extremists and anti-Ethiopian forces and to protect the sovereignty of the land," Meles said a few hours after the airstrikes.

For a sixth day, the heaviest fighting took place outside the southern town of Baidoa, the government's only stronghold, and sources said the Ethiopians were close to taking the town of Beledweyne, about 150 miles to the northeast.

Fighting was also reported around the town of Gaalkacyo, near the Ethiopian border along a main supply route to the north.

Meanwhile, thousands of Somalis, who have endured decades of war and deprivation, fled their homes to escape bullets, rockets and mortar fire, while others were trapped by the two sides' advance.

Sources said casualties probably numbered in the hundreds, although U.N. officials said it was unclear how many were fighters and how many civilians.

In Mogadishu, Islamic movement leaders, who have received support from Ethiopia's bitter enemy, Eritrea, and other countries, called on foreign fighters to join a holy war against Ethiopian troops.

This week and all day Sunday, young men in the battered capital have signed up for war and AK-47 assault rifles, Somali sources said.

Meles, an increasingly authoritarian leader, has said that the United States supports his country's right to protect itself. For months, he has characterized any possible Ethiopian military action in Somalia as motivated by self-defense.

As fighter jets streaked across Somalia on Sunday, Ethiopian officials on state-run television again accused the Islamic movement of supporting ethnic Somali insurgent groups in Ethiopia, a charge that Ethiopian opposition leaders have said was overblown and out of date.

The United States and Ethiopia have also accused the Islamic movement of harboring terrorists, a charge it has repeatedly denied.

The Islamic movement, in turn, has accused the United States of tacitly giving Ethiopia a green light to invade. In a recent interview, Ibrahim Hassan Addou, foreign minister for the Islamic Courts, said that even if the movement was harboring terrorists, the United States should pursue them lawfully by presenting evidence, rather than "by threats and intimidation."

"If war breaks out, the U.S. is siding with Ethiopia . . . and the consequences of war will be because of Ethiopia and the U.S.," he said.
Ethiopia is dominated by Christian leaders and a Christian army, although Muslims now make up nearly half the population. The Courts movement has highlighted that in its efforts to recruit Muslim fighters.

Somalia, a clan-based society that has been without a central government since 1991, has historically been of great strategic importance to the United States because of its proximity to the Middle East and Red Sea oil-shipping routes.

But U.S. policy there has failed to do much more than incur the antipathy of ordinary Somalis.

Earlier this year, the CIA financed warlords who called themselves an "anti-terrorism coalition" but mostly terrorized ordinary Somalis, who came to hate them. It was in that context that the Courts came to power in June.

Initially a grouping of local clerics, the Courts imposed Islamic law village by village, and by most accounts established a sense of order, although many Somalis have expressed discomfort with the harsher aspects of Islamic law.

Analysts and diplomats fear that even if Ethiopia initially routs the Courts, a regional war of terrorist-style attacks would follow. Already, car bomb attacks in Baidoa have killed several people, although no one has asserted responsibility.