Mogadishu’s Warlords Announce Peace Pact : Accord: Somali clans agree to put an immediate end to fighting in the capital. But violence inland continues.

They met, they prayed side by side, they embraced, and, after their first meeting in more than a year of brutal war, the leaders of Mogadishu’s two major warring clans on Friday announced a historic peace pact.

The accord, forged during a three-hour meeting at a makeshift U.S. Embassy, promises to immediately cease all hostilities, restore the unity of their fractured political alliance, remove the bulk of their weapons from the city limits and tear down the Green Line that carved up the city and has paralyzed efforts to feed Somalia’s starving masses.

As helicopter gunships hovered overhead, the seven-point agreement was read out on a cracked, bleached tennis court. Then the warlords, Mohammed Farah Aidid and Ali Mahdi Mohamed, embraced for the television cameras at center court.

The agreement, reached in the residence of Robert Oakley, the special U.S. envoy to Somalia, came less than 72 hours after U.S. Marines hit Mogadishu’s beaches and began a U.N.-sponsored effort to drag this devastated African nation back from anarchy and famine.

And it resonated quickly on the streets of the capital, which is slowly coming under U.S. Marine control, despite continuing looting, concern over the fatal shooting of two unarmed civilians by French and American troops Thursday night and logistic snarls that delayed the scheduled delivery of 9,000 tons of food to northern Mogadishu.

The clan warfare in Mogadishu subsided within hours of the agreement. But in the interior, especially around Baidoa, where 50 people die daily of starvation, relief agency compounds had become armed camps engaged in nightly firefights against incessant attacks by looters anticipating the arrival within days of the Marines.

In a morning meeting with U.S. Marine Lt. Gen. Robert B. Johnston, commander of Operation Restore Hope, U.N. officials appealed for immediate military intervention in Baidoa, about 160 miles northwest of the capital. But Johnston replied that a larger force was needed to permanently secure the Baidoa airport and the villages around it.

“I can’t give you a firm timetable,” Johnston told reporters after the U.N. meeting ended. “In the next seven to 10 days, we will have something firm in there.”

Deepening the daily tragedy in Baidoa and other areas of the country, according to aid officials, each hour that passes exposes the expatriate workers to further attacks from bandits eyeing the expensive electronic goods in relief agency compounds.

Baidoa was once a comparatively wealthy city that now is the strategic key to breaking the famine that has killed 300,000 Somalis and threatened 2 million more. It was driven into starvation by drought but also by political reprisals. The forces of ousted President Mohamed Siad Barre wreaked havoc on the region, avenging its support for breakaway Gen. Aidid, whose own forces now control much of the town.

Relief workers predict that Aidid’s armed supporters will retreat as soon as the Marines arrive. Meantime, the personal risks taken by international aid agencies to feed the starving grow exponentially.

In Washington, Pentagon officials disclosed that some U.N. relief workers had been taken hostage by gangs in Kismayu. They refused to provide further details pending the outcome of negotiations for the workers’ release. They said there were no Americans involved.

Rear Adm. Michael W. Cramer, the joint staff’s intelligence director, warned that more such incidents may occur as regional gangs seek to gain advantage over one another.

“Unfortunately, this is not an unusual circumstance in Somalia, and we likely will see this kind of activity . . . continued,” he said. He said experience showed that hostages generally have been released unharmed in return for money or food ransom, as happened earlier this week. But, the incidents underscore that “the security situation in Kismayu . . . is still very unstable.”

In Somalia, analysts have said that the key to saving Baidoa and the regions surrounding two other cities ruled by guns, Kismayu and Bardera, is a large enough military presence to intimidate potential foes and drive out marauding gangs.

As the daytime skies filled with military and civilian jets and helicopter gunships and the city streets roared with more and more armored vehicles, it was clear that those reinforcements were arriving here. The U.S. Marine contingent in Somalia grew on Friday to more than 2,000 of the 28,000 American soldiers who have been ordered to duty in this country. An airport that three days ago was just a rusty relic has been transformed into a high-tech American military show.

For the first time in two years, the airport has a functioning control tower. A unit of Marine and Air Force controllers, using portable radios, guided in what Marine spokesman Col. Fred Peck called “an airflow” that Friday alone included seven huge military transport planes and two Boeing 747 civilian charters carrying Marines from Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms.

The Marines continued to reinforce their new headquarters at the U.S. Embassy compound, which lay in ruins after Americans were evacuated after the fall of the U.S.-backed Siad Barre. During a briefing Friday, Peck said Marines found that the embassy buildings had been “gutted in a senseless and almost insane fashion” by rampaging mobs after Siad Barre’s overthrow.

But the main issue of the day was the shooting in which two Somalis were killed and seven wounded after a car tried to run a roadblock manned by French and American troops. Many feared those first casualties would jeopardize American’s newfound goodwill on Mogadishu’s streets, where former hired guns were sporting benign wooden canes and sticks, late-model luxury cars emerged from garages and former Somali police donned their old uniforms.

Although many Somalis shrugged off the incident as a regrettable result of an otherwise welcome military operation, others were angry, particularly with the French, whom the Somalis see as colonizers of neighboring Djibouti. The 2,000 French Foreign Legion troops are based in Djibouti.

During Peck’s detailed account of the shooting, he conceded that U.S. Marines also fired on the passenger vehicle--after an initial volley of fire by the French soldiers who were manning the front of the roadblock. The French troops first flashed lights and shouted warnings at the truck and then “fired on the truck as it continued to proceed downhill” toward several Marines on a tank, Peck said.

The Marines joined fire, “thinking it to be some threat to them. I don’t have to recall to you what a truck did to some hundred Marines not too long ago,” he added, referring to the 1983 suicide bombing at a Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. service personnel.

Times staff writer Art Pine in Washington contributed to this report.

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