Ethiopia to pull troops out of Somalia

By Tsegaye Tadesse

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Ethiopia said on Friday it would withdraw its troops from Somalia by the end of this year, piling pressure on Somalia's feuding government and African nations that had promised to send peacekeepers.

Addis Ababa has sent thousands of soldiers to support Somalia's Western-backed interim administration, whose divisions have hindered its battle against Islamist militants waging an Iraq-style insurgency.

President Abdullahi Yusuf's government wants a fully-fledged United Nations peacekeeping force to replace a small African Union (AU) mission that has been unable to stem the violence.

"The Ethiopians are at the end of their tether because of the squabbling in the interim government, which they have backed at such enormous human and financial cost," Rashid Abdi, Somalia expert at the International Crisis Group, told Reuters.

He said Ethiopia also was angry at the West, which gave it tacit approval to deploy there, but then let it shoulder the burden of trying to stabilise Somalia, while also criticising human rights abuses by its soldiers there.

"I think they'll decide to pull out their forces, seal the border, then make the kind of incursions they made in the past to ensure the (Islamist rebels) do not become a serious threat."

A spokesman for Ethiopia's Foreign Ministry told Reuters that Addis Ababa had informed U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Jean Ping, chairman of the AU Commission, by letter on Tuesday of its decision to withdraw its military forces.

Fighting in Somalia has killed 10,000 civilians since early 2007, driven more than a million from their homes and left more than 3 million Somalis in need of emergency food aid.