Somalia's transitional government (TFG) will launch a new offensive against Shebab Islamic insurgents in the south of the country, Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Sharmarke said Sunday.
The new tactic comes after government forces, helped by African Union AMISOM peacekeepers, beat off a Shebab offensive in the capital in August.
"It was a really positive kind of outcome for AMISOM (African Union peacekeepers) and our forces, how they cut the flood of this huge offensive and fought alongside each other," Sharmarke told reporters in Mogadishu.
"We also have to think of another option, an option of opening a new front different from Mogadishu and ... opening fronts in central regions, Bay and Bakol, from the (southern) Juba land areas," he added.
The new offensive would take place before the end of the year, he added.
Capturing the jihadist stronghold Shebab-held port of Kismayo was the "key to handicap all the financial resources of the war they conducted," Sharmarke said.
Last week, the UN appealed to the government, whose mandate runs until 2011, to end its bitter infighting, warning that Shebab insurgents posed a serious international security threat.
Sharmarke acknowledged that there had been political divisions within the transitional government, which is controls only parts of the capital and is propped up by 7,200 Ugandan and Burundi African Union troops.
"It's not a secret that me and the president (Sharif Sheikh Ahmed) do not sit eyes to eyes," he said.
Party members disagree on leadership and national security and will meet soon in a vote of confidence.
Sharmarke said he was "100 percent confident that if procedures and rules are respected, the government will not be sacked."
Twenty years of civil war has virtually brought Somalia to its knees and a frail government struggles to stand in the way of insurgents seeking to seize power in the Somali capital.
Source: AFP.
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