"The current situation in Somalia provides a historic opportunity for the Somali people to achieve a broad-based, inclusive government," it said in a statement Friday.

Government troops backed by Ethiopian soldiers have swept quickly across the country since Sunday, retaking territory captured by the Islamic movement earlier this year. The government had previously only controlled the western town of Baidoa, where it had set up its base.

Many in overwhelmingly Muslim Somalia, however, are skeptical of the government's reliance on neighboring Ethiopia, a traditional rival with a large Christian population and one of Africa's largest armies. Ethiopia and Somalia fought a bloody war in 1977.

Earlier Friday, Ethiopian troops aboard tanks fired warning shots into the air after dozens of young men threw stones as the convoy traveled through the city on the way to secure the airport.

Yusuf said Ethiopian troops would stay in Somalia for now because "the government is not up to the level of taking back the entire country overnight." He vowed to pursue those still willing to fight for the Islamic group.

Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, the executive leader of the Council of Islamic Courts, the umbrella group for the Islamic movement, told the AP on Friday his fighters would remain defiant.

"We will not run away from our enemies. We will never depart from Somalia. We will stay in our homeland," he said from the southern city of Kismayo, where his forces retreated from Mogadishu.

Hundreds of foreign fighters, mainly Arabs and southern Asians, were seen in Kismayo on Friday. Some of the Islamic movement's members espouse an extreme form of Islam, and the United States accuses it of harboring al-Qaida terrorists.

Somalia's president vowed to take the fight to Kismayo. "We are going to go there and confront them," Yusuf told reporters. "If we capture them we will bring them to justice."

Ethiopian jets continued to buzz the front line town of Jilib, 65 miles north of Kismayo. Jilib is at a crucial junction of rivers and roads that lead to Kismayo.

Before the Islamists established control, Mogadishu had been ruled by competing clans who came together to support the Islamic fighters. Somalia's complex clan politics have been the undoing of at least 14 attempts to install a government in this violent, anarchic nation.

Now, some fear the clans could return to fighting one another and may reject the government's authority. Gedi's government is riddled with clan rivalries, most notably between the young prime minister and the elderly president, Yusuf.

The UN said Friday it will resume humanitarian food aid flights to the country this weekend. Fighting forced the UN to evacuate its international staff and halt assistance to 2 million people affected by the conflict and recent floods.

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