Nairobi, Kenya — Eighteen people are feared dead and several others seriously injured after two days of intense fighting between two rival factions in the Somali town of Bulla-Hawa, press reports said Thursday.

A dispatch by the Kenya News Agency, or KNA, said the fighting was confined to Bulla-Hawa, which lies adjacent to the Kenyan border town of Mandera.

KNA named the two Somali factions engaged in the gun battle as the Somali National Front, or SNF, and the fundamentalist Alitihad Movement. The report said the two are fighting to control Bulla-Hawa.

The town was, until a month ago, under the control of Ethiopian soldiers who have since withdrawn, leaving a power vacuum which the two factions are now trying to fill.

The Ethiopians are said to have occupied the whole of Somalia's Gedo region since 1996, when they overran the Alitihad Movement, pushing them into the interior in order to pave way for the SNF faction to have control of the region.

The fighting, according to KNA, has not yet spilled into the Kenyan side of the border. The Kenyan border police were on the alert, however.

Somalia fell into anarchy soon after the overthrow of former strongman Siad Barre in 1991. He fled into exile where he later died.

Since then the country has been controlled by clan-based warlords who have divided the country, including the capital Mogadishu, into fiefdoms.

The northern part of the country later broke away, and declared itself the Republic of Somaliland, with its capital at Hargeisa.

Though no country has officially recognised the Hargeisa government, the region has enjoyed relative peace, with virtually all arms of government functioning. This week the Ethiopian Airlines began flying to Somaliland.

In August 2000 a provisional government for Somalia was formed under the mediation of Djibouti, Somalia's northern neighbour.

The government, led by a former interior minister in Siad Barre's administration, Abdkassim Salat, has received a lot of goodwill from African governments, but the country's warlords continue to oppose it.