Tentative calm reported in Mogadishu after bloody battle

Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, was quiet but tense on Friday, following two days of heavy fighting between militia allied to the city's Islamic courts and those loyal to a group of faction leaders, residents said.

"Today, the situation is calm, but there are no [ceasefire] negotiations going on," said Abdullahi Ali Hassan, executive director of the Centre for Education and Development, a Mogadishu-based nongovernmental organisation.

Local media reports said at least 30 people were killed on Tuesday, including a mother and two children whose home was hit by a mortar shell. An estimated 100 people were wounded in the fighting, which began on Tuesday night. Thousands of people have fled the city.

Hassan said militia loyal to the Islamic coalition appeared to be in control of much of south Mogadishu and had even captured the Sahafi Hotel in the Kilometre 4 area. The hotel is owned by Abdulrashid Ilqayte, who is part of the newly created Alliance for Peace and the Fight Against International Terrorism.

"Displaced people are still out of their homes because they fear that more fighting will happen," Hassan said, adding that some people had sought refuge in the suburbs of Mogadishu, while others had headed south towards the Lower Shabelle and Middle Shabelle regions. "Somalis help each other, but you know people here live from hand to mouth, so the fighting has made life very difficult," he said.

Francois Lounseny Fall, United Nations envoy for Somalia, has condemned the fighting and demanded an immediate and unconditional end to the violence. "Somalia is already at war with nature and poverty," Fall said in a statement released in Nairobi. "The last thing this country needs is for its leaders to be fighting among themselves. This is a time for pulling together, not for pulling further apart."

The latest bout of bloodletting broke out in Mogadishu on 7 May and continued for a week, killing almost 200 people. Both the anti-terror coalition leader Nur Daqle and Shaykh Sharif Shaykh Ahmed, the chairman of the Islamic courts, belong to the Agoon Yar subclan of the Abgal community. What started as an internal feud between members of the subclan soon became a battle between the Islamic courts and the anti-terrorism alliance that comprises several Mogadishu-based faction leaders.

The Horn of Africa state has had no functioning government since 1991, when the administration of President Muhammad Siyad Barre was toppled. Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which was created in Kenya in 2004 following lengthy reconciliation talks between representatives of the country's numerous clans and political factions, is still struggling to overcome internal divisions and establish its authority. The TFG is currently based in the south-central city of Baidoa.