Mogadishu - Somali troops and Islamist insurgents clashed Thursday, leaving at least 20 people killed and 30 injured in some of the worst fighting in weeks in the lawless country. The fighting broke out early Thursday in Dayeeno, some 650 kilometres north of the capital Mogadishu after Islamist militias ambushed transitional government troops, using rocket-propelled grenades and other heavy artillery.
In the 30-minute battle, the Islamists managed to oust the troops, killing at least 15 of them.
"A short time of fierce fighting caused numerous deaths. Wounded people are just streaming past me," said Mohamed Moalim, who witnessed the violence.
Another ambush attack rocked Qansah Dhere, 90 kilometres southwest of Baidoa, the provincial capital that houses the government, as Islamist fighters killed three soldiers and wounded eight others, officials said.
"They intended to kill me but my bodyguards defended me," said Abdi Fatah Mohamed Gasey, the regional governor.
Anarchic Somalia has been convulsed by violence since the Ethiopian-backed transitional government toppled a popular Islamist group in January 2007. It was plunged into civil war in 1991.
Meanwhile, the French medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said Thursday it was to close a surgical project in southern Somalia after being faced with an "unprecedented" crisis of insecurity.
A Kenyan surgeon, a French logistics expert and their Somali driver working for the agency were killed in a bombing in late January near the southern town of Kismayu, where MSF is closing its project. MSF said its other programmes in the rest of the Horn of Africa country would remain operational.
"There is a significant need for independent humanitarian assistance in Kismayu, but we cannot continue working in a place where our staff have been deliberately targeted and brutally murdered," said Arjan Hehenkamp, MSF's director of operations for Somalia.
MSF withdrew all of its international staff after the January attack but has returned some personnel to areas it considers safe to work.
The United Nations has called Somalia's conflict the "world's worst and most neglected humanitarian crisis" with a raging insurgency in Mogadishu and violence in other parts of the country forcing hundreds of thousands from their homes.
The Kismayu clinic, which opened in September 2007, conducted more than 400 surgeries, MSF said.
