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MOGADISHU,(Insidesomalia.org)- At least nine people were killed including three Ethiopian soldiers and seventeen others were wounded in fierce fighting between Ethiopian soldiers and insurgents forces in Mogadishu, the Somali capital Friday, witnesses and hospital sources said.
“Three Ethiopian soldiers in military uniforms were being dragged in the street near our nieghbourhood” Fanah Yare, an eyewitness in Salaama neighborhood told Insidesomalia.
Residents in Gubta near Mogadishu Stadium, the scene of the fiercest battles, say four civilians were also killed in Gubta neighborhood in the south of the capital.
“Four people were killed after they were hit by stray bullet and shrapnel from the fighting”, said resident Dahir Isse, who lives in Gubta where many civilians fled the on going calshes which began Friday morning after Ethiopian troops fanned out of their bases in the former Defense Ministry building in the south of the Somali capital Mogadishu and Mogadishu stadium.
The Ethiopia troops tried to carry out house-to-house search for insurgents and explosives but the soldiers met strong resistance from Islamist fighters, forcing them back into their bases, according to residents.
The searches and the subsequent battles follow a bloody confrontation between the Ethiopian troops and suspected Islamist fighters early Thursday evening after the insurgents attacked Maslah Camp, an Ethiopian army camp in the south of the city.
Medical staff at Medina hospital, Mogadishu’s main health centre, said that nineteen injured people were admitted to the hospital but two of them died on the operating table. They were severely injured in the fighting that has been raging for nearly six hours in the south of the coastal city of two million people.
Somali government officials and Ethiopian military commanders, who do not usually speak to the media about military operations, were not available for comment on the latest fighting.
Thousands of Ethiopian troops and tanks are currently deployed in Somalia after they crossed the border into Somalia late last year to help the internationally-recognized interim government oust the Islamic Courts, a movement that has been briefly in control of much of central and southern Somalia.
Hundreds of families fled their homes to escape the on-going fighting. A UN report early this week says that nearly 100,000 civilians left the capital to the outskirts of the city to escape the daily upsurge in violence in Somalia's capital in the past three days.
Somali has been without a central government since 1991 when the country was plunged into clan rivalry after the overthrow of the late ruler until the current interim government was set up in 2004 in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital.
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