Workers Fear Escalation in Somalia War : Africa: Fighting cripples relief efforts in famine-stricken nation.

A surprise military offensive this week by forces associated with Somalia’s deposed dictator has crippled relief efforts in at least two major famine centers in that country and threatens to undermine emergency aid programs nationwide, according to relief organizations and aid workers evacuated from the area.

Many of the workers said they feared that the attack Tuesday on the town of Bardera, 190 miles west of the capital, Mogadishu, presages a new escalation of the Somali civil war. The main effect of such escalation will be the suspension of international relief efforts for as many as 2 million starving Somalis, they said.

The relief agency CARE International withdrew all of its workers from Bardera after it was overrun by troops loyal to former Somali strongman Mohamed Siad Barre. The attackers were under the command of Siad Barre’s son-in-law, Gen. Mohamed Siad Hirsi, who goes under the nom de guerre “Morgan.”

Bardera had been the field headquarters of Gen. Mohammed Farrah Aidid, one of the country’s leading warlords in the post-Siad Barre era.

Siad Barre fled Mogadishu in January, 1991, as rebel forces--including Aidid’s--closed in on his stronghold. He eventually made his way to asylum in Nigeria. Since then, Morgan, who was not himself seen in the attack on Bardera, has commanded a force of unknown size under the banner of the Somali National Front.

Aidid, who had moved temporarily to Mogadishu, has already started planning a counterattack.

“I feel there’s going to be another battle,” Robert Allen, CARE’s team leader in Bardera, said Friday. Allen was speaking in Nairobi after being evacuated there.

Morgan’s assault on Bardera met little resistance from Aidid’s rump force in the town, according to Allen and other witnesses. But it forced tens of thousands of displaced Somalis in the town to flee into the bush, where they cannot be reached by relief agencies, and it provoked CARE’s withdrawal.

The evacuated aid workers said there was no warning of the attack. They had known for weeks that Morgan’s troops were encamped not more than 25 miles from the town, but as late as 12 hours before the attack, Aidid’s commander on the scene had assured Allen that they presented no threat.

“Twelve hours later, we had new commanders,” Allen said.

The first sign for some relief workers that a battle was under way came from the flight of refugees.

“We saw crowds of people coming our way, just thousands, going for their lives,” said Barbara Mitchell, CARE’s program officer for health care in Bardera. “It was clear that there was no way we could stay in the town, because our target group was gone.”

CARE had been serving 110,000 starving Somalis in the town of Bardera and its environs.

The fighting also caused feeding programs in nearby Baidoa, perhaps the worst famine center in Somalia, to be drastically scaled back over fears that it could become a battleground in any counterstrike by Aidid’s forces. Of Baidoa’s population of more than 200,000 displaced persons and townspeople, more than 100 die every day from starvation. In the last week, CARE and other relief agencies have reduced their personnel in Baidoa to minimal levels to simplify any future evacuations.

Food flights are continuing into Baidoa, in contrast to Bardera, where operations are “all shut down,” according to Rick Grant, a CARE spokesman in Nairobi.

The suspension occurred just one day after U.N. and relief agencies agreed in Geneva to finance a 100-day crash program to immunize Somalia’s children, increase the amount of emergency food and revitalize the country’s destroyed agricultural economy. The program depends on the cooperation of local warlords and the absence of widespread warfare.

The attack by Morgan also underscores the task confronting any international “peacekeeping” force that might be deployed to quell the Somali fighting and safeguard relief supplies. About 500 Pakistani troops are bivouacked at Mogadishu’s main airport, sent to protect relief shipments arriving there and at the nearby seaport. But although the troops have been in place since Oct. 5, their commander has not deployed them out of uncertainty over how the heavily armed Somali gangs ringing the ports might react.

Nevertheless, on Friday, CARE International President Malcolm Fraser, a former prime minister of Australia, called for the deployment of 15,000 U.N. troops throughout Somalia to bring peace, a figure five times as large as anyone has previously suggested.

But Fraser acknowledged that the outside world has not shown the political inclination to inject a large force of soldiers into a raging civil war, where their effect is as likely to be negative as positive.