Ten civilians have been killed and twenty others wounded in a fierce fighting between insurgent fighters and Somali government forces backed by Ethiopian and African Union peacekeepers, hospital sources and local media reports said Friday.
A previously unknown group calling itself the Ras Kamboni Brigades said it carried out the attack on Somali government forces guarding the Presidential Palace, the residence of the Somali President and the Prime Minister in the south of Mogadishu.
Local Shabelle radio reported that ten civilians were killed separately when stray shells and bullets hit residential neighborhoods around the battle areas in Wardigley, Hawalwadag and Hodon districts as well as other areas in south Mogadishu.
Hospital sources say that twenty civilians with shrapnel and bullet wounds were admitted into the few hospitals operating in Mogadishu.
It is not clear if the warring sides sustained any causality in the renewed fighting.
Spokesman of the group Sheik Mohamed Mohamoud Dulyadeyn said that his groups, which spit with the Islamic Courts Union, carried out the latest attacks and will intensify fighting with Somali government forces, Ethiopian troops and African Union peacekeepers.
"We will continue fighting, the forces of the apostasy (the Somali transitional government) and the occupying troops, during the last ten holiest days of Ramadan," Dulyadeyn told reporters in a telephone press conference.
Hundreds of residents in the battle areas in the south of Mogadishu are still fleeing their homes to join the nearly a million displaced people already on the suburbs of the capital.
(Xinhua News Agency September 27, 2008)
