January 01, 2009	Thursday	Muharram 03, 1430

MOGADISHU, Dec 31: Ethiopian troops propping up Somalia’s western-backed government are primed to withdraw in the next five days, officials said on Wednesday, potentially leaving a dangerous power vacuum in the Horn of Africa nation.

The end of Ethiopia’s two-year presence in Somalia and this week’s departure of President Abdullahi Yusuf are seen by diplomats and analysts as an opportunity to forge an inclusive government which can work for peace.

But some Islamist insurgents have vowed to keep fighting the government even when its military allies leave, and a hardline opposition group seen as key to any lasting peace said Somalia risked a new civil war.

“We remain in our bases, but we have been ordered to prepare for departure any hour in the coming five days,” said an Ethiopian military official, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to talk to the media. A senior government official also said the troops would go and that Somali Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein would discuss the withdrawal with African Union and Ethiopian officials in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa on Thursday.

“We so far have been informed that Ethiopian soldiers shall all leave Mogadishu the first week of January as already planned and I can confirm to you they will pull out,” he said.

Ethiopian troops in Somalia are estimated at up to 3,000 and the international community has been scrambling to beef up a separate African Union force there of 3,200 troops, but the United Nations has ruled out any quick deployment. African Union officials say some 2,500 soldiers from Uganda, Burundi and Nigeria are ready to deploy but financial and logistical obstacles have so far prevented them from effectively replacing those Ethiopian soldiers left.

ISLAMISTS TO FIGHT ON: Without central government since 1991, Somalia has become the epitome of a failed state and the chaos onshore has fuelled rampant piracy in the busy shipping lanes off the coast.

More than 10,000 civilians have been killed in a two-year Islamist insurgency, a million people have fled their homes and a third of the population rely on emergency aid. Diplomats say the Ethiopian departure may take the sting out of the insurgency, which has become a nationalist cause and holds sway in much of southern and central Somalia.

Without the Ethiopians to fight, diplomats predict the Islamists will fracture into a small militant wing urging Jihad, or holy war, and moderate elements more open to talks.

A spokesman for the most hardline wing, al Shabaab, which is on Washington’s terrorist list, said on Tuesday the group would wage war until Somalia became an Islamic state.

Diplomats in the region hope Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, leader of the hardline wing of the opposition Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia, can be encouraged to become part of a more inclusive administration.

—Reuters