More Burundi troops deploy in Mogadishu-witnessesSat 11 Oct 2008
By Abdi Sheikh
MOGADISHU, Oct 11 (Reuters) - Two African Union military planes landed in Mogadishu on Saturday carrying 400 Burundian reinforcements for an embattled peacekeeping force, sources at the airport said.
The AU mission, AMISOM, is guarding sites in the chaotic Somali capital where a U.N.-backed interim government and its Ethiopian military allies are fighting Islamist insurgents.
The multinational African force was supposed to be 8,000 strong but has been operating for months with 2,200 soldiers, all from Uganda and Burundi.
"Two planes landed carrying at least 400 Burundian troops," a staff member at Mogadishu's airport told Reuters, asking not to be named.
AMISOM spokesman Barigye Ba-Hoku said: "I am not at liberty to talk about the movement of our troops. If there is a deployment we'll formally inform the Mogadishu people."
Last month, Islamist al Shabaab rebels vowed to shoot down aircraft using the coastal airstrip and fired mortar shells at another AU military plane that touched down there.
The threats effectively shut down the city's main airport until Thursday, when a civilian plane carrying 120 Somali deportees from Saudi Arabia landed without incident.
Peacekeepers at the airport and elsewhere in the capital have been targeted in a string of attacks since Islamists launched an Iraq-style insurgency in early 2007 that has killed nearly 10,000 civilians and an unknown number of combatants.
Having ruled south Somalia for six months in 2006, but then been forced out by allied Ethiopian-Somali troops, the Islamists have regrouped and now control large swathes of the south again.
The worst insecurity for nearly two decades in the Horn of Africa country has fuelled a wave of kidnappings this year as well as an explosion of piracy in shipping lanes off the coast. (Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
