Thousands of Somalis chanted anti-American slogans on Monday in protest against a US-backed plan to send foreign peacekeepers to prop up the country's tottering interim government.
In a crumbling football stadium, Somalis including women and children shouted "Down with the USA!" as poets recited anti-American and anti-Ethiopian verses accusing the two of planning to invade the anarchic nation.
Washington last week proposed a resolution at the UN Security Council to push forward a peacekeeping deployment requested two years ago by Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf, an Ethiopian ally who leads the shaky interim government.
"They say this is a peacekeeping force but we see them as foreign aggressors ... we see this as an attack on us," senior religious group Abdirahman Janaqow told the crowd.
The Somali Islamic Courts Council (SICC), the nation's most powerful military force which has imposed Shariah law across most of southern Somalia, is vehemently against a plan it paints as part of a US-led war against Muslims. The religious group closed schools and businesses in their headquarters in Mogadishu to make way for the rally.
It came as US Army General John Abizaid, the top US commander for the Horn of Africa, finished a trip to Addis Ababa "to receive updates on the situation in Somalia and along the border with Eritrea," a US embassy statement said.
Abizaid met Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Washington's top counter-terrorism ally in the region and a longtime opponent of militant Somali Muslim groups who have tried to stir up dissent in Ethiopia's ethnically Somali regions.
Some diplomats and analysts believe Security Council approval of the deployment could spark war between the government and religious group, and then suck in their respective backers, Horn of Africa rivals Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The group has exploited traditional rivalry against Ethiopia - seen by Somalis as a Christian imperialist power - to whip up popular fervour against a move that could trump their military superiority and expansion plans. The SICC has declared holy war against Ethiopia, and has demanded Ethiopian troops in Somalia - estimated by various experts to be between 5,000 to 15,000 - leave. Ethiopia says it has only sent a few hundred military trainers.
The religious group and Ethiopia's State Minister for Foreign Affairs, Tekeda Alemu, met in Djibouti over the weekend at talks designed to resolve the stand-off peacefully. "The response from the other side was not encouraging," Tekeda said in a statement printed in the Ethiopian media. The SICC's foreign affairs chief, Ibrahim Hassan Addow, told reporters: "I repeated our position to him that we will not negotiate with them while they have troops in Somalia."
A UN-commissioned report last month said Ethiopia has been sending troops and military equipment to the Somali government at its sole base in Baidoa, and is among at least nine nations pumping arms and military supplies into Somalia on both sides.