Somalia: slip sliding away

On Saturday, Islamic militias and government forces clashed for the first time, a worrisome step in a situation that has the potential to get worse.

Government militia seized and set on fire two "technicals" -- heavily armed pickup trucks that are Somalia's version of tanks -- in fighting in the remote Qoryooley district, an Islamist source told Reuters.

There was no word on any casualties in the clash, the first since Islamists captured Mogadishu from warlords on June 5, challenging the slim authority of President Abdullahi Yusuf's Western-backed government.

One of the sheikhs in the Islamic Courts has declared a "holy war" to drive out Ethiopian troops, which have entered Somalia in an effort to prevent the unrest in Somalia from spilling across the porous border into Ethiopia.

"I am calling on the Somali people to wage a holy war against Ethiopians in Somalia," said Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys of the Union of Islamic Courts.

Ethiopia denies that its forces are in the government's base of Baidoa, but a BBC reporter has seen them patrolling.

The UIC took control of the capital, Mogadishu, last month.

Since then it has consolidated its power over much of southern Somalia.

But Ethiopia is strongly opposed to the Islamists and has repeatedly warned that it will send its army into Somalia if the interim government is attacked.

On Wednesday, Islamist militiamen were reported to have advanced to within 60km (37 miles) of Baidoa. They have since withdrawn and deny planning to attack the town.

Ethiopian soldiers have in fact entered a second Somalian town.

Ethiopian troops moved into a second Somali town on Saturday to protect the country's weak, U.N.-backed government, angering the Islamic militia that controls most of Somalia and causing peace talks to collapse.

About 200 Ethiopian troops, driving in pickup trucks mounted with machine guns, moved into Wajid and took control of the airport, meeting no resistance, witnesses said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared reprisals.

Wajid is a U.N. aid base 46 miles southeast of the Somali-Ethiopian border. It is run by a clan-based administration not allied with either the government or the Islamists.

In response to the sheikh's threat, Ethiopia responded in kind.

Ethiopia has vowed to "crush" the powerful Somali Islamic courts, a day after they threatened a holy war against Addis Ababa, which they accuse of sending troops to protect Somalia’s weak interim government.

The warning came as witnesses reported an incursion of Ethiopian troops into a second Somali town close to Baidoa, the seat of the country’s toothless government, ostensibly to protect it from any advance by the Islamists.

The BBC has a page giving some background to the history of enmity between Ethiopia and Somalia.

Somalia has always maintained that Ethiopia occupies a part of its territory - the Ogaden region - ceded by British colonialists to Ethiopia.

Ethiopia disagrees and the failure of the Organisation of African Union (now the AU) to resolve the dispute led Somalia to declare war on Ethiopia in 1964. It also sponsored an Ethiopian rebel movement against the then-government of Emperor Haile Selassie.

But it is the 1977 Ethiopia-Somalia war that lingers more prominently in the minds of the people of the Horn of Africa.

The conflict was not only bloody but also costly to both nations and it did not in any way alter the situation in Somalia's favour.

It is also worth noting that as Somalia slipped into anarchy, the neighbours were sponsoring each other's rebel movements.

You know the nearer you are to Islamofascism, the more you're slip sliding away.