MOGADISHU - African Union troops on Friday seized a rebel stronghold near Mogadishu from al Qaeda-linked insurgents, a spokesman said, marking a big blow against the al Shabaab rebels who have used the town to stage sporadic attacks on the capital. The capture of Afgoye by the AU force AMISOM and Somali government troops, who already control most of Mogadishu, also paves the way to securing a corridor to the capital that would allow easy access to humanitarian aid to residents. "We are now fully controlling Afgoye town," Lieutenant Colonel Paddy Ankunda, the AMISOM spokesman, told Reuters. Al Shabaab confirmed the capture of the town by the AU forces on its website www.somalimemo.net, and said the Islamists withdrew as a tactic. "Thousands of our enemies, AMISOM, with tanks, entered Afgoye town on Friday after three days of fighting," the website said. "They took the town without resistance. The mujahideen withdrew as part of our tactics." Afgoye is a strategic junction town on the road leading from Mogadishu to the south of the Horn of Africa nation, about 30 km (20 miles) outside the capital. The AU force began its advance on Tuesday, forcing hundreds of families to flee their makeshift homes in the Afgoye corridor, once a rural area northwest of Mogadishu but now home to hundreds of thousands of Somalis uprooted from their homes during years of chaotic fighting. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Friday about 6,200 people had been displaced following the fighting in Afgoye. The African Union has said securing the Afgoye corridor, believed to be an area with the largest concentration of internally displaced people in the world, would give some 400,000 people access to aid. Al Shabab has waged a bloody five-year insurgency to remove Somalia's Western-backed government and impose its harsh interpretation of sharia, Islamic law, on a country that has had no central government for the past two decades. The Islamist militants, who control swathes of Somalia, are also fighting against Somali government and Kenyan troops in the rebel-controlled southern and central parts of the country. Ethiopian forces have also crossed into Somalia.
