Mogadishu - At least 17 Islamist insurgents have been killed in a gun battle in the Somali capital Mogadishu, a local government official said Friday. The battle came as the insurgents attacked the home of Ahmed Hassan Daa'I, the district commissioner of Wadajir, south Mogadishu, in the early hours of Friday morning.
"Today we killed 17 insurgents around my home," Hassan Daa'I told reporters. "We have their dead bodies and the weapons they used to attack my home."
Witnesses said that they saw at least 11 bodies in the street but could not tell if they were combatants or civilians.
"The fighting was fierce with both sides using heavy weapons." Mohamed Mokhtar, a Wadajir resident, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Islamist insurgents have been fighting Somalia's transitional federal government since Ethiopian troops helped oust the Union of Islamic Courts in early 2007.
Insurgent group al-Shabaab last week advanced to the edge of the capital and has seized important towns such as the strategic port Kismayo in recent months.
An estimated 10,000 civilians have died since the insurgency began and almost 1 million have fled their homes, many from Mogadishu.
The Horn of Africa nation has been plagued by chaos and civil war since the ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed Sunday admitted that the insurgents are now in control of most of Somalia.
Yusuf said that the government could not even keep order in Mogadishu and Baidoa, the seat of the parliament.
He and Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein have been unable to agree on a new cabinet as a political dispute sparked by the ousting of the Mogadishu mayor drags on.
Yusuf said that the failure to do so was responsible for the advance of the Islamists and called on Somali members of parliament who had remained in Nairobi after a regional meeting last month to return home.
African Union Commission Chairman Jean Ping said the political chaos has also helped fuel a recent surge in piracy, which peaked with the weekend seizure of a Saudi supertanker carrying crude oil worth 100 million dollars.
Almost 40 ships have been hijacked this year and the UN says that pirates have scooped as much as 30 million in ransoms this year alone.
