13 killed in Somalia violence

Islamic insurgents battled Somali and Ethiopian forces Sunday and a roadside bomb blew up near a police checkpoint in separate clashes that killed 13 people in Somalia, witnesses and police said.

Six people were killed in clashes that erupted after Islamist insurgents ambushed a Somali military convoy near Baidoa, some 250 kilometres (155 miles) northwest of the capital Mogadishu.

A witness said the insurgents had fired "mortars and machine-gun fire" at nine armed government vehicles. A second witness said nine Somali soldiers were taken to hospital in Baidoa.

In another incident, the bodies of four civilians were found near Wanlaweyn, some 90 kilometres (55 miles) south of Mogadishu, after fighting between Ethiopian forces and insurgents.

"We found four bodies near the area where Ethiopians fought insurgents," Hasan Sugow, a resident in the nearby Yaqbiriweyne town, told AFP by telephone, adding that the dead were herdsmen.

Three other people including two police officers were killed when a roadside bomb went off in northern Mogadishu, bringing the death toll to 13 across Somalia on Sunday.

"The bomb, hidden near a police checkpoint, went off and killed two of our men and a civilian," police official Mohamed Ahmed Yonis told AFP. Several other witnesses confirmed the fatalities.

Ethiopian troops intervened to prop up the feeble Somali government at the end of 2006 and eventually drove the Islamists from much of the country's southern and central regions, where they had established Sharia law.

Since then, the Islamists have killed numerous government officials and vowed to fight until the Ethiopians, whom they regard as occupiers, withdraw.

Somalia has lacked a functional government since the 1991 ouster of president Mohamed Siad Barre touched off a bloody power struggle that has defied numerous peace initiatives.