Hours before the expected landing of the Marines, Somalia's chief warlord urged his followers Tuesday to keep their gun-mounted vehicles away from the port and airport to avoid clashes with U.S. forces.
Mohamed Farrah Aidid, responding to an appeal from U.S. envoy Robert Oakley, said his forces welcomed the U.S. troops that were to begin arriving at dawn Wednesday to hasten a relief mission to feed starving Somalis.Oakley later met with Aidid's chief rival, Ali Mahdi Mohamed, and said the two leaders had promised to cooperate with the Marines and were broadcasting instructions to their fighters over radio stations.
Both warlords, Oakley said, "acknowledge that neither one totally controls the situation."
Mogadishu is a city in which bands of teenage gunmen roam the streets in so-called technicals - a variety of makeshift military vehicles armed with machine guns, rocket launchers and cannons.
Some are hired by merchants to loot aid shipments for resale in Mogadishu's markets and owe no special allegiance to either Aidid or Ali Mahdi.
Speaking at his headquarters in this war-shattered city, Aidid declined to say whether he would disarm his fighters, who have loose control over the southern half of the city and much of the countryside. But he urged them to cooperate with the Marines.
"I have given a message to the Somali people urging them not to go to the airport and the port in their technicals," Aidid said.
In what appeared to be an example of the tenuous control of the warlords, clansmen loyal to Aidid on Monday seized Ber-berus Delio, an Italian water engineer working for UNICEF.
Aidid said he knew nothing about the arrest but would look into it.
Relief coordinators were taking precautions in advance of the Marines' arrival.
UNICEF pulled its four foreign workers out of north Mogadishu, which is ruled by Aidid's rival, and sent a memorandum to employees telling them not to come to work Wednesday or Thursday unless summoned in writing. Other relief agencies also said their workers would probably stay inside those days.
"Tomorrow's not going to be a day of uncertainty, but it's not going to be a normal working day, so let's not pretend it is," said Mark Stirling, the head of UNICEF in Somalia.
Oakley, a former ambassador to Somalia, sought assurances the warlords' men would steer clear of the more than 28,000 U.S. troops being sent here, and to make clear that the Americans' intentions are strictly humanitarian.
In an interview with ABC, Oakley said Aidid and Ali Mahdi had warned that some of the armed factions were out of their control, but "they seem to feel optimistic the situation will come off without any major difficulties."
"I don't believe that we're going to be able to take all the arms away from the Somalis any more than we can get them out of the major cities in the United States," he said.
Fewer young gunmen have been on the streets of Mogadishu in recent days. There have been reports that many have moved inland, intimidated by the size and firepower of the foreign force headed in.
Rival militiamen battled for two days in Baidoa, one of the inland towns hit hardest by famine and a planned early destination for U.S. forces. A spokesman for the international relief agency CARE, Rick Grant, said some 70 people had been killed Sunday and Monday.
Somalia collapsed into chaos after rebels drove dictator Mohamed Siad Barre from power nearly two years ago, then began fighting among themselves.