A Desert Duel Keeps Heating Up

Lots of advisers but very few prisoners in the Ogaden

The war between Ethiopia and Somalia in the Horn of Africa ground grimly on last week. On the battlefield the Ethiopians and their Soviet and Cuban advisers, who are now thought to total about 6,000, were clearly gaining in their drive to oust Somalian forces from Ethiopia's Ogaden desert region. But if the Somalis were running scared, there was little sign of it in their capital, Mogadishu. The mood was all but jubilant, as the government announced a general mobilization and inducted 30,000 volunteers, including women and 15-year-olds, in a national militia.

Somalia's President Mohammed Siad Barre, who was Moscow's most loyal friend in the area until he kicked the Russians out last November, stepped up his appeals (so far unsuccessful) for Western military support. "If the Russians are not thrown out of this region," he told an interviewer, "the third world war could break out."

In Ethiopia, Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, leader of the ruling Provisional Military Council in Addis Ababa, was directing his anger at Washington. During a government-sponsored press tour (see following story), Mengistu accused the U.S. (falsely) of indirectly supplying arms to Somalia. At week's end an American delegation led by David Aaron, deputy director of the National Security Council, arrived in the Ethiopian capital to urge Mengistu not to burn his remaining bridges with the U.S. Last week TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief David Wood was in the Ogaden. His report:

Somewhere deep in the stony, inhospitable Ogaden desert, a vicious war is being fought with sophisticated weaponry and ground troops made up largely of ill-trained and illiterate peasants. But while the outside world has been denied a look at the actual fighting, the devastation left in the wake of advancing and retreating armies is evident enough.

Outside Harar, a major town in the Ogaden, Somali tanks and artillery fought for two months against Ethiopian defenders dug into the hillsides. Along the winding dirt road from Harar to the front, small huts of clay bricks and thatched grass roofs were burned by occupying Somali forces, then hit by rockets and bombs from Ethiopian warplanes. Now the rubble lies mixed with brass shell casings, shattered steel helmets and bodies left to rot when the war passed through.

Fedis, an agricultural center of 5,000, is deserted. The dirt streets of the village are strewn with torn clothing, bricks, pieces of tin roof and spent shells. When the rockets came, the people fled. A few hundred have turned up in Harar, a day's walk away, where they took shelter in warehouses, their bundles of belongings arranged in a circle around each family. The rest exist in the bush, watching the kites (scavenging hawks) circle their villages. Last week the Ethiopian air force dropped leaflets telling the villagers it was safe to return home. Most declined.

At the military airfield at Dire Dawa, dozens of green-and-brown-camouflaged MiG-17s and 21s thunder off into the sky each day to strike at Somali forces hundreds of miles away. As they roar down the runway, mules pulling carts plod past the barbed-wire boundaries of the tarmac, carrying jugs of water. The combatants themselves are hardly better off. There are indications on both sides that the greenest troops are pushed into the front lines. One captured Somali who said he was 13 years old was shown off by the Ethiopians in Harar. The youth claimed he had been forced into the army, given two months' training and sent to the front.

In the latest round of heavy fighting, which began during the last week of January around Harar, the Ethiopians say they have lost 500 to 700 dead and 1,500 wounded and have killed some 2,000 Somali army regulars. The actual figures are almost certainly higher, but the Ethiopian claim to have taken only 17 prisoners is probably accurate: both sides expect their soldiers to die fighting, and each side claims the other has special squads to eliminate troops that surrender.

Western diplomats in the area believe that while the Ethiopians have settled in for a long campaign to push the Somalis out of the Ogaden, the war could end fairly quickly if the Somalis decide to pull their army back, intact, behind their border. Indeed there was some indication that they were withdrawing their heavy artillery. But according to Somalian officials, this merely signals a shift back to guerrilla tactics against the Ethiopian forces. If the Somalians do execute a full retreat, there is now no serious concern that the Ethiopians will try to occupy any Somali territory, although in their discussions with U.S. diplomats in Addis Ababa, Soviet officials have refused to rule out "hot pursuit" missions across the border.

In assessing the situation, a U.S. diplomat points out that "not all the results are in yet on the Soviet gamble on the Horn." For one thing, the Ethiopian regime's loyalty to Moscow has yet to be deeply tested. Mengistu is a nationalist above all, and there may be some truth in his claim that he turned to Moscow partly because the U.S. would not sell him weapons. In any case, the Soviets can hardly escape the many reminders of how quickly allegiances can change on the Horn. The Ethiopian soldiers still wear American-supplied uniforms; their weapons, ammunition and even their slang are mostly U.S.-issue too. Only a few have the new caps, supplied by the Soviets, that sport a hammer and sickle.

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