Somali govt. says weakened by rebel onslaught

President Abdullahi Yusuf has admitted Islamic fundamentalist insurgents now control most of Somalia and raised the prospect his government could completely collapse. The rebels have been slowly advancing on the capital, raising the stakes in their two-year rebellion and undermining fragile U.N.-brokered peace talks to end 17 years of chaos in the Horn of Africa nation. A grenade attack on Sunday killed four people and injured nine others in Baidoa, the government's seat. "Most of the country is in the hands of Islamists and we are only in Mogadishu and Baidoa, where there is daily war," Yusuf told some of his legislators in neighboring Kenya on Saturday. His remarks were aired by Somali media late on Saturday. "We, ourselves, are behind the problems and we are accountable in this world and in the hereafter. Islamists have been capturing all towns and now control Elasha. It is every man for himself if the government collapses. Elasha is only 9 miles south of Mogadishu. Yusuf blamed his government's ineffectiveness partly on disagreements between him and Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein. Regional head of states held a Somali crisis meeting at the end of October and demanded the four-year administration name a new cabinet within 15 days. "The prime minister gave me a list of new cabinet ministers but I do not know how to approve names of those who destroyed our government when the constructive ones were excluded," Yusuf told the legislators. "We have no government (ministers) and we should go back to our country very quickly and establish a government." Yusuf is in Nairobi to meet MPs who remained after the regional meeting. Some analysts said he lobbied them to vote against the list of ministers the prime minister forwarded to him when the matter was tabled in parliament. The Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) ruled Mogadishu and most of south Somalia for half of 2006. US-backed Ethiopian and Somali government forces toppled them but they have waged an Iraq-style guerrilla campaign since then, gradually taking back territory. As when they controlled the capital in 2006, the UIC are again providing much-needed security in many areas but are unpopular with many moderate Muslims in Somalia for also imposing fundamentalist practices. The turmoil in Somalia has caused instability across the Horn of Africa, fuelling one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters and triggering a wave of pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden, a vital shipping lane for trade between Europe and Asia.