NAIROBI, Kenya -- Somali President Mohamed Siad Barre fled his African nation's capital Mogadishu, and rebels announced Sunday they had overthrown him after a month's fierce fighting for control of the city.
After 21 years in power and more than 10 years of civil war, Barre finally made his exit at around 8:15 p.m. local time Saturday by driving away from his presidential palace in a tank, according to western doctors in Mogadishu.
Shortly afterwards, rebels of the United Somali Congress took over the palace, and broadcast their coup Sunday on what was once government- controlled Radio Mogadishu.
A spokesman for the Franco-Belgian agency Doctors Without Frontiers in Mombasa, Kenya, said doctors in Mogadishu had confirmed the rebels now controlled the whole of the Indian Ocean city, including the airport.
Until Saturday, the airport and his palace were the only areas Barre still controlled.
As of late Sunday, Barre's whereabouts could still not be confirmed. The doctors' organization said it believed he had either flown out of the country Saturday or headed south to the town of Kismayu, 270 miles further down the coast, where the president was believed still to have supporters.
The fall of the Barre government, which has been accused of grave human rights abuses, came after a month in which Mogadishu was reduced to the point of collapse. The USC rebels first attacked the city on Dec. 28 last year, provoking a bitter fight with loyal troops of Barre's Special Military Police.
There were no rules in the conflict. Both sides killed civilians indiscriminately, Barre shelled his own capital city, diplomats and embassies were fired upon and one South Korean diplomat killed. Thousands fled into the countryside as the streets filled with rotting corpses, the power went off and the water either dried up or became poisoned.
Barre proclaimed an increasingly desperate series of cease-fires -- ignored by the rebels -- repeatedly promised to step down if fighting stopped, pledged multi-party democracy and reshuffled his cabinet.
None of it worked.
Somalia has had at least three rebel movements for the past decade, incapable of allying with each other because of fierce clan loyalties, but all determined to end Barre's rule, which human rights agencies worldwide have described as one of the most barbaric on the planet since he took power in 1969.
In his war with northern rebels of the Somali National Movement since 1981, Barre perpetrated 'wholesale slaughter of non-combatants, aerial bombardment of civilian targets, secret detentions in squalid conditions, the burning of villages, the indiscriminate use of land mines, the deliberate destruction of reservoirs and killing of livestock,' according to a 1990 report by the human rights group Africa Watch.
