Ethiopian jets bomb Islamic forces in Somalia

LONDON – Ethiopian troops attacked Somalia’s Islamic Courts movement on four fronts, Ethiopian officials said Sunday, with Ethiopian 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.

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 nearby town of Beletwayne.

Fighting was also reported around the northern town of Galkayo, near the Ethiopian border, along a main supply route to the northern part of the country.

Meanwhile, thousands of Somalis, who have already 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 were likely in the hundreds, though U.N. officials said it was unclear how many were fighters and how many were 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.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, an increasingly authoritarian leader, has said that the United States supported his country’s right to protect itself. For months, he has characterized any possible Ethiopian military action in Somalia as a war of self-defense.

As fighter jets streaked across Somalia on Sunday, Ethiopian officials speaking 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 old.

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

The Islamic movement has accused the United States of tacitly giving Ethiopia the green light to invade. In a recent interview, Ibrahim Hassan Addou, foreign minister for the 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, though Muslims now comprise nearly half the population. The Courts movement has highlighted that in its efforts to recruit young 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 earlier this year.

Initially a grouping of local clerics, the Courts imposed Islamic law village by village, and by most accounts established a sense of order even if many Somalis are uncomfortable 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 be the ultimate result.

Already, car bomb attacks in Baidoa have killed several people, though no one has asserted responsibility.