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In Somalia, violence greets peacekeepers

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published March 7, 2007

MOGADISHU, Somalia - The first peacekeepers to arrive in Somalia's capital in more than 10 years were met with a surge of violence Tuesday as mortar rounds hit the airport during a welcoming ceremony and deadly gunbattles broke out on the city's crumbling streets.

The street battles involving masked gunmen killed three people, and mortar rounds wounded one, all of them civilians, witnesses and police said. The violence was the latest example of the volatility that peacekeepers face in a country that has seen little more than anarchy for years and where the government, backed by Ethiopian troops, toppled an Islamic militia only months ago.

Hassan Abukar Sidow, a Mogadishu resident, told the Associated Press the street fighting began after police searched for suspects in the airport attack.

The bloodshed came as about 400 Ugandan peacekeepers arrived in the capital to protect the Somali government and to allow for the withdrawal of troops from neighboring Ethiopia, which helped the administration topple a radical Islamic militia that controlled much of southern Somalia for six months.

The Ugandan troops are the vanguard of a larger African Union force authorized by the United Nations to help the government assert its authority in one of the most violent and gun-infested cities in the world.

Peacekeepers have kept clear of Mogadishu for more than a decade, during which much of the country was ruled by violence and clan law. The United States sent troops to Somalia in 1992 as part of a U.N. relief operation for tens of thousands of starving civilians, but in 1993 clan militiamen shot down two Black Hawk helicopters and killed 18 American soldiers.

U.S. forces withdrew in 1994, and the U.N. peacekeeping operation was abandoned in 1995.

[Last modified March 7, 2007, 01:11:26]