Government appoints strongmen after Mogadishu fighting

MOGADISHU, Apr 29 (Reuters) The Somali government has appointed two strongmen to top jobs in Mogadishu, officials said today, after battles with rebels that have killed at least 1,300 people since February.

Abdi Hassan Awale, popularly known as Qaybdiid, and Mohamed Dheere -- both former warlords -- take over as national police boss and mayor of the shell-scarred capital respectively.

More than a third of the seaside city's one million residents have fled the fighting, which pitted interim government troops and their Ethiopian military allies against Islamists insurgents, foreign jihadists and some clan militia.

''We wanted to do some reshuffling due to the factors on the ground,'' a spokesman for President Abdullahi Yusuf told Reuters, without elaborating. ''We are hoping they will both fulfil their jobs well and do something about public health.'' Qaybdiid was one of the last of a group of US-backed warlords to surrender to Islamists who seized the capital last year before being ousted by allied Somali-Ethiopian troops.

Dheere was the self-appointed local governor whose forces secured Jowhar, 90 km (55 miles) north of Mogadishu, as a temporary base for the interim government in 2005, after it was born out of tortuous peace talks in neighbouring Kenya.

Both men inherit huge challenges. While the guns largely fell silent on Friday after nine days of the heaviest fighting in the city for 16 years, it remained unclear whether the insurgents had been defeated or melted away to regroup.

Some homes and commercial properties have been looted.

The United Nations has warned of a looming catastrophe with more than 365,000 people fleeing the capital since February -- most of them clinging to survival in surrounding areas already ravaged by a severe drought and then swamped by floods.

It says the displacement rate in Somalia over the past three months has been worse than in Iraq in the same period.

The African Union (AU) wants more peacekeepers sent urgently to support a vanguard of about 1,500 Ugandan troops -- who have so far been restricted to guarding sites like Yusuf's office and the air and sea ports, and to treating wounded civilians.

Several African nations have pledged to send soldiers, but as with its previous peacekeeping foray in Sudan's Darfur region, the AU is facing shortages of money and equipment.

REUTERS KK RK1645