MOGADISHU, Somalia — The Islamist insurgent group Shabab attacked the main Somali airport here with mortars Thursday as the nation’s president prepared to board a plane to Uganda, setting off a series of artillery battles between government forces and insurgents that left at least 18 people dead, Somali officials said.

The mortars struck the perimeter of the airport, and Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, the president of Somalia’s weak but internationally recognized transitional government, was unharmed. The plane took off safely for Kampala, where Mr. Ahmed is attending a summit on displaced people in Africa, Abdulkadir Mohamed Osman, the presidential press officer, said.

The mortars and artillery shelling that followed between governments and insurgents killed at least 18 and wounded more than 60 in several neighborhoods in Mogadishu, witnesses said.

“I saw 11 people killed by artillery rounds at Bakara junction,” the city’s largest market area, one witness, Abdirahman Omar, said by telephone.

Aamina Hussein, 30, who was slightly wounded by shrapnel in the right leg in the nearby Howlwadaag neighborhood, said that she saw five bodies lying on the ground as she was hit. “I am lucky I survived,” she said in an interview.

Sources from Lifeline Africa, an emergency volunteer ambulance organization, said that more than 20 dead bodies and 60 wounded were collected from the Howlwadaag and Hodan neighborhoods in Mogadishu. Mortars fired by Shabab, which has been linked to Al Qaeda, also struck a African Union peacekeeping base at the airport, officials said.

Somalia’s weak but internationally recognized transitional government is facing intense resistance from insurgent groups trying to overthrow it and introduce strict Sharia law in the country.

African Union troops in Somalia are protecting the transitional government. Insurgents have relentlessly been attacking them, often with suicide bombs, mortars and roadside explosives. Somalia has been without a functional central government since 1991, when clan militias ousted the country’s last central government and then turned on one another.

Comments

comments