Ethiopia to withdraw from Somalia by end 2008

Ethiopian troops will have fully withdrawn from Somalia by the end of 2008, bringing an end to a two-year military intervention, a foreign ministry spokesman told said Friday.

Wahide Belay said that the deadline for the pullout was announced in a letter sent on Tuesday to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and African Union Commission Chairman Jean Ping.

"Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin has stated that Ethiopia had decided to withdraw at the end of the year," Wahide said.

Diplomats who saw the letter confirmed that the pullout was due to be completed by the end of year.

Ethiopian troops have frequently clashed with the rebels, who control most of the south and launch near-daily attacks on government forces and AU peacekeepers in the capital Mogadishu.

Ethiopia presence 'inappropriate'

Ethiopia sent troops to Somalia in 2006 to oust the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a radical group which had conquered most of the country and were imposing a strict form of Sharia.

Ethiopian troops were meant to prop up the embattled transitional federal government but the internationally-backed authorities never succeeded in asserting their power on the restive country.

Al-Shabaab, the former youth and military wing of the ICU, has since waged a bruising guerrilla war against Somali government troops and Ethiopian forces.

A recent agreement between the more moderate members of the Somali opposition and transitional government was reached in Djibouti for a gradual withdrawal of Ethiopian troops, but no deadline had been announced.

"We have concluded that its inappropriate for Ethiopia to maintain its troops in Somalia," Wahide told AFP.

"We have done our job and we are proud of it, but the expectations that we had from the international community were never fulfilled. But that said, we will withdraw in a responsible manner," he said.

"We had a conviction that a vacuum shouldn't be created, and one option for averting that was through full deployment of AMISOM (African Union mission in Somalia), but that became difficult to achieve," Wahide added.

In 2007, the African Union started deploying peacekeepers in Mogadishu but their troops have failed to curb the daily fighting, which has killed thousands of civilians this year alone.

"The national reconciliation among the TFG and the opposition went on very slow despite all our efforts," the foreign ministry spokesman said.