Faction leaders condemn fighting

Somali faction leaders currently gathered in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, have continued talks with Ethiopian officials. Muhammad Ibrahim Habsade, the second deputy chairman of the Rahanweyn Resistance Army (RRA), said the southern-based opposition grouping of the Somali Restoration and Reconciliation Council (SRRC) condemned the fighting which flared up in Mogadishu on Wednesday as a result of a TNG police operation. He called it “provocation by the Arta group (TNG)”. Habsade denounced it as an attempt by the TNG to seize areas in Mogadishu under the control of the SRRC. “If this continues, the SRRC as a group will join the fighting to assist Husayn’s [Aydid’s] forces” he told IRIN. Habsade said some of the faction leaders in Ethiopia, including Husayn Aydid, were out of Addis Ababa “on a work-related trip”.

According to Habsade, who spoke to IRIN by telephone from Addis Ababa, discussions in Ethiopia were focusing on holding “all-inclusive reconciliation talks”. However, he said that the SRRC would not talk to the Mogadishu-based Transitional National Government (TNG) for so long as it claimed to be a national government. “We will sit down with them only as one faction meeting another faction,” he said.