FIGHTING FLARES IN MOGADISHU, AT LEAST 60 DEAD

By Guled Mohamed

July 10, 2006

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Fighting surged in Mogadishu on Monday between Islamist militias and fighters loyal to the city's last warlords, pushing the death toll over two days to at least 60 and pounding a key hospital with artillery and gunfire.

Residents feared the death toll would climb even further in the most ferocious fighting in the capital since the Islamists seized it a month ago from an alliance of U.S.-backed warlords.

Witnesses said fighters exchanged rocket, artillery and machinegun fire.

"The hospital is under very heavy mortar and artillery attack and stray bullets are hitting. Chaos is everywhere in the hospital and staff are running away," Abdikadir Sheikh, a medical official at Mogadishu's Madina Hospital, told Reuters by phone as artillery and gunfire crackled behind him.

Sheikh and residents of Mogadishu's Kilometre Five area said the death toll had risen by at least 40 and nearly 100 had been wounded since heavy street battles broke out at dawn on Sunday in the neighboring Kilometre Four area.

Witnesses said artillery and mortar shells rained down on Kilometre Five as the battle shifted areas and cut many victims off from Madina.

"The number of dead will be more than 60 because so many of the injured cannot go to the nearest hospital," a Kilometre Five resident who refused to give his name said.

Late on Monday, a militia source said warlord fighters were preparing to surrender their weapons to the Islamists.

"They have accepted to hand over their weapons...They have been overpowered by the Islamists," former warlord fighter Ibrahim Moallim told Reuters.

The warlord militias could not be reached directly for confirmation.

TALKS IMPERILLED

Residents said the streets were empty as militiamen traded automatic weapons fire, and "technicals" -- pickup trucks mounted with heavy weapons that are Somalia's version of tanks -- rolled forward with their guns blazing.

The battles broke out on Sunday when the Islamists set a daybreak ambush in Kilometre Four for fighters loyal to Hussein Aideed, an interior minister in the interim government, and another warlord, Abdi Awale Qaybdiid.

Sources close to Qaybdiid said he had left his stronghold in the capital and would not reveal his location.

Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, leader of the executive arm of the Islamists, had urged the enemy militiamen to lay down their guns.

"We are calling upon Abdi to end the problems he is bringing to the people of Mogadishu. He shall go the same way the other warlords went," Ahmed told a press conference.

The Islamists have taken control of most of the coastal capital and a key swathe of Somalia, posing a serious threat to the interim government, which is too weak to enter Mogadishu and is now based in the south-central town of Baidoa.

Both sides are due for a second round of talks in Khartoum on Saturday. Both sides are due for a second round of talks in Khartoum on Saturday, but the fighting appeared to imperil that.

Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Gedi told the BBC on Monday that the government would not meet hardline Islamists -- repeating comments made to Reuters two weeks ago -- nor those who broke the ceasefire agreed on at talks in June.

The Islamists want to impose sharia law across the country and oppose the deployment of foreign peacekeepers, which interim President Abdullahi Yusuf says is essential to get his government on its feet and pacify the Horn of Africa country.

(Additional reporting by Mohamed Ali Bile)