ADDIS ABABA (AFP) - Ethiopian military this week killed at least 71 Islamist insurgents in deadly clashes in central Somalia, the defence ministry said in a statement on Thursday.

Somali Islamist insurgents on Tuesday attacked an Ethiopian army convoy travelling from Guguriel near the Ethiopian border to Mataban, about 450 kilometres (280 miles) north of the capital Mogadishu.

"In a joint operation (with Somali forces) that started on June 30 around Guguriel, 71 terrorists from the UIC and Shabeb were killed," the statement added.

Although Ethiopia said the operation started on Monday, fighting was reported on Tuesday.

The Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) is a the political wing of the Shebab militants who have been accused by western intelligence of links with Al-Qaeda.

"Among them, 13 were high-ranking officers, who included a Somali with Canadian citizenship. Several weapons were destroyed during the campaign," it added.

Somali witnesses said the Tuesday attack killed at least 26 people, mainly combatants.

Residents reported that the fighting, in which both sides used armoured vehicles, was the heaviest in the region since Ethiopian forces entered Somalia in late 2006 to bolster the country's weak government.

The Ethiopian army, which rarely comments about such incidents, has pledged to pull out once the United Nations deploys a peacekeeping force to strengthen an embattled African Union peacekeeping force confined to Mogadishu.

Since they were ousted from power last year, the Islamists have waged a bitter guerrilla war, targeting Ethiopian, government and African Union targets almost daily.

According to several international rights groups and aid agencies, the fighting has left at least 6,000 civilians dead and displaced hundreds of thousands in the last 12 months alone.

On June 9, the Somali government and its political opposition signed agreements, including a ceasefire scheduled to enter into force within 30 days, but Shebab has refused to recognise it.

Instead, it has vowed to keeping fighting until Ethiopian forces pull out of Somalia, a nation that has been plagued by an uninterrupted civil war since the 1991 overthrow of president Mohamed Siad Barre.

The African Union has deployed some 2,600 peacekeepers in Mogadishu but the contingent on the ground still falls far short of the 8,000 troops pledged by the continental body and has failed to stem the violence.

At least 2.6 million Somalis are facing hunger due to acute food shortages spurred by a prolonged drought, insecurity and high inflation. UN famine monitors have warned that the figure could hit 3.5 million by year's end.

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