Somali pro-govt supporters call for foreign troops

BAIDOA, Somalia, Sep 21 (Reuters) Hundreds of government supporters gathered in the Somali interim administration's base today, to call for foreign peacekeepers, three days after President Abdullahi Yusuf escaped an assassination attempt.

Women and youth groups in Baidoa shouted pro-government slogans saying Monday's suicide bombing exposed the need for foreign troops to be sent to protect the administration, which is too fragile to return to the capital Mogadishu.

Yusuf has blamed al Qaeda for the attack, which killed five people, including his brother, outside parliament in the southwestern town 240 km from the capital.

Six attackers were also killed in a gunbattle with Yusuf's bodyguards after the blast.

''We want foreign peace forces to come and help our government,'' Adan Hersi, a young demonstrator, told Reuters during the rally organised to coincide with the international day of peace.

Last week police in Baidoa shot in the air to disperse a crowd of about 100 people protesting against the deployment of international peacekeepers.

The Western-backed interim government and the African Union want peacekeepers to be sent to the Horn of Africa country, deprived of effective central rule for 15 years, but newly powerful Islamists oppose the plan.

Washington and other governments fear Somalia could be a safe haven for al Qaeda-linked extremists, a belief fuelled by the murder of an Italian nun on Sunday. Leonella Sgorbati was buried in Nairobi today.

The Islamists, who took Mogadishu and a swathe of south Somalia earlier this year, have met twice with Yusuf's government for talks in Khartoum aimed at an eventual power-sharing deal for the nation of 10 million.

But both sides remain far apart on the issue of deployment of foreign troops with senior Islamists saying Monday's bomb attack was a pretext by some of Somalia's neighbours, notably Ethiopia, to justify the need to send peacekeepers.

Mahamud Mohamed Barbar, the governor of Bay region, where Baidoa is located, said the government wanted peace.

''We want peace, we want to see peace start in Baidoa then to spread to the whole of Somalia,'' he told chanting demonstrators.

Islamist officials plan a similar demonstration in Mogadishu tomorrow to protest against foreign peacekeepers. Islamist leaders have threatened holy war if they deploy.

Somalia descended into lawlessness in 1991 when warlords ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, before turning on each other and carving the country of 10 million into a patchwork of personal fiefdoms.

UNICEF Somalia representative Christian Balslev-Olesen told Reuters in an interview that Somalia has become the ''optimum'' breeding ground for extremism because of levels of malnutrition and education that are among the worst in the world.

Reuters SP VV1731