Jubilant Somali gunmen dragged the bodies of Ethiopian soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu yesterday, after a day of intense fighting between Islamic insurgents and loyalist Somali troops backed by Ethiopian forces killed at least ten people and forced thousands to flee the capital.

Witnesses reported that at least seven Ethiopian soldiers were killed after Somali government forces and their Ethiopian allies pounded Islamist strongholds.

Helicopter gunships attacked targets with rockets in the first use of aerial power in the current spate of violence. Aid workers said that at least 100 people were admitted to hospital for treatment after the fighting.

Tanks also joined the battle, and witnesses reported that a mortar struck a mosque, killing a baby and a teenage boy.

A spokesman for the Ethiopian-supported transitional Government said that the operation was the beginning of a three-day push to restore order in Mogadishu, which has come under daily attack by groups supporting the Islamists.

“The operation will take at most three days and it’s aimed at rooting the terrorists out of the city,” said a spokesman for the interim President, Abdulahi Yusuf Ahmed, a northerner who is fiercely opposed by the Hawiye clan, which dominates Mogadishu.

Early indications were that the Islamists, backed by Hawiye militias, had repulsed the attacks. In south Mogadishu Islamist fighters dragged the bodies of at least two Ethiopians through the dusty streets.

Such scenes have not been seen since the battle of Mogadishu between American forces and hundreds of Somali fighters in 1993. Nineteen US servicemen were killed and 84 wounded. Even though up to 700 Somalis were also killed, their comrades celebrate the event as a great victory.

The African Union agreed this month to send a peace-keeping mission to Somalia to ensure calm when Ethiopian forces withdraw. Since 1,700 Ugandan forces began arriving, they have been the targets of daily attacks and have largely been confined to barracks.

The latest fighting has renewed fears that it could escalate into a regional conflict, drawing in Ethiopia’s other main rival, Eritrea, pro-Western Djibouti and even Sudan.

Yesterday Eritrea, which supported the Islamists in Somalia, was accused of also arming antiEthiopian rebels inside Ethiopia. Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, told Parliament that Eritrea was also behind the kidnapping of five Britons linked to the British Embassy in Addis Ababa and their guides in Afar, northern Ethiopia, this month.

The British group were released some two weeks ago, but so far there has been no news of their eight Ethiopian guides, drivers and cooks — an issue that diplomats fear could wreck an uneasy truce since the two countries fought a border war between 1998 and 2000 in which at least 70,000 soldiers were killed.

Regional experts also fear that Africa’s most-wanted terrorists, who escaped the joint US-Ethiopian onslaught in January, could carry out attacks in Kenya and Tanzania, similar to the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi.

“The whole thing has been a huge cockup,” an analyst said. “We are now looking at an Iraq-style insurgency in Mogadishu, with all that implies for the region.” Washington reversed its policy of boycotting Somalia after Islamist groups, some with links to al-Qaeda, seized power from warlords last June.

“The ouster of the Islamists has simply reawakened the sleeping Muslim,” Abdi Hassan, a Somali expert in Nairobi, said. “People in Somalia defined themselves by clans. Now they are united on religious and clan lines against the invader. This is just the beginning.”

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