Al-Qaeda In Somalia.

Three days of fighting on April 18-20 between Qaeda-affiliated Neo-Salafi insurgents and Ethiopian troops in Somalia backing the pro-West government killed at least 113 civilians and wounded 229 others. This was revealed on April 20 Sudan Ali Ahmad, chairman of the decade-old Elman Human Rights Organisation of Somalia. On April 20, the UN refugee agency revised its estimates of people who fled Mogadishu to 321,000, up from 218,000 earlier in the week, saying the additional figures were from new information about Mogadishu residents who had fled to central Somalia towns.

Somalia's capital is estimated to have a population of 2m. The UN refugee agency said its work was hampered because a suicide car bombing had been staged on the road from Mogadishu, where there is a warehouse of relief supplies. Mogadishu streets were the scene of continuous heavy fighting on April 20 between the insurgents and Ethiopian troops. A suicide car bomb, al-Qaeda's main weapon, on April 19 exploded at an Ethiopian army base. The only casualties were people killed inside the car.

The US State Department believes al-Qaeda operatives in Somalia are at least partially responsible for the growing violence in Mogadishu. But also involved in the violence are clan militias vying for power who are not necessarily linked to the Neo-Salafis. In the Eritrean capital, Asmara, senior Somali Islamic leader Shaikh Sharif Shaikh Ahmad who has links with al-Qaeda, Somalia's Deputy Prime Minister and warlord Hussein Aided and former speaker Sharif Hassan Shaikh Aden who also has links with al-Qaeda, on April 19 called for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from their country. The three leaders said if the US-backed Ethiopian troops did not withdraw peacefully, Somalis will rise up and force them out.

US officials have named Eritrea as a supporter the months-old insurgency in Somalia's capital. Eritrea and Ethiopia are historic rivals, and there had been concerns they were fighting a proxy war in Somalia. In a statement on April 20, the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry said Ethiopian officials had several unpublicised meetings with members of Somalia's Neo-Salafi movement to make sure they "understood Ethiopian concerns" about Somalia. The statement did not say when or where those meetings took place. It said that all Ethiopia wanted was "a peaceful and stable government" in Somalia. Somalia has not had an effective national government since 1991, when warlords overthrew dictator Muhammad Siad Barre and then turned on one another, throwing the country into anarchy. The transitional government was formed in 2004 with UN help, but has struggled to extend its control over the country.

It is difficult to determine if President Abdullahi Yusuf, assorted clan leaders, or the Neo-Salafi Islamic Courts Union (ICU) is most to blame for the current state of affairs. But Somalia does not function well as an independent state, and has not done so for decades. It is only the latest example of a string of Arab states which have collapsed into shattered sovereignties and active domestic warfare, because they allowed their local feuds to converge with regional and global power contests.