Militants’ Airport Attack Misses Somali President - NYTimes.com

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By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM

MOGADISHU, Somalia — The nation’s most feared Islamist insurgent group, the Shabab, attacked the nation’s main airport with mortars here on Thursday as the president prepared to board a plane to Uganda, Somali officials said.

The president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, was unharmed, the officials said, but the attack was followed by an artillery strike on the nation’s biggest market that left at least 18 people dead, according to witnesses and ambulance workers.

Several members of Parliament called a news conference to denounce the artillery barrage, which they said had been fired by African Union peacekeepers, who are here to protect the weak transitional government but are finding themselves increasingly under fire from militants. The troops maintain a base at the airport.

Bootaan Isse Aalin, one of the Parliament members, said the shelling was “unlawful and inhuman.”

But Maj. Barigye Bahoko, a spokesman for the African Union troops in Somalia, denied that the peacekeepers had fired the artillery. “Anyone is free to comment on what is going on in Somalia and those parliamentarians never condemned the assassinations and shelling by Al Shabab,” he said. “I don’t know if they have something to do with Al Shabab.”

Anger at the peacekeepers has been rising, with civilians accusing them of indiscriminately shelling residential areas where insurgents live side-by-side with noncombatants — a charge the peacekeepers deny.

Many Somalis turned against the peacekeepers after an episode in February, when troops responded to a roadside bomb attack by firing wildly into a crowded street.

Somali officials say the peacekeepers killed 39 civilians; the troops say that the toll was much lower and that the victims were hit in cross-fire.

On Thursday, witnesses said that because there was no gun battle with militants at the time of the artillery attack, they suspected that most of the dead at the Bakara marketplace were civilians.

The mortar strike on the airport as Sheik Sharif’s plane was leaving, for a summit meeting on displaced people in Africa, raised renewed concerns about the Shabab’s intelligence capabilities. The government had tried to keep secret the timing of Sheik Sharif’s trip.

“Of course, as the government has sources within the Shabab, so do they,” said Abdulkadir Mohamed Osman, a presidential spokesman. “That does not mean that they are part of the government.”

Witnesses and the members of Parliament said the artillery attack on Thursday started soon after the mortar strike on the airport.

Aamina Hussein, 30, who was slightly wounded by shrapnel in the right leg in the Howlwadaag neighborhood, where the market is, said 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 bodies and 60 wounded people had been picked up in Howlwadaag and the nearby Hodan neighborhood.

Somalia’s transitional government is facing intense resistance from insurgent groups trying to overthrow it and impose Shariah, the strict Islamic legal code. Western leaders say that Sheik Sharif, a moderate Islamic cleric who came to power in January, has the best chance of any leader in years to bring stability to the war-torn nation.