By Abdi Shekih and Aweys Yusuf

MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Insurgents in Somalia seized a strategic town north of Mogadishu on Wednesday for the second time in two weeks, a spokesman for the insurgents said.

Jowhar is the most significant of several towns the rebels have captured in recent months, highlighting the inability of the Western-backed interim government to impose its authority despite support from Ethiopian Woyanne and African Union (AU) troops.

The insurgents briefly seized Jowhar on March 26. Then early on Wednesday, they did it again.

“No fighting took place because the enemy troops had abandoned the town by midnight when they heard we were coming,” the insurgents’ spokesman Abdirahim Isa Adow said by telephone.

The rebels freed prisoners in Jowhar, which served as the government’s temporary base in 2005, Adow told Reuters.

Local Somali broadcaster Shabelle said the rebels wore turbans and chanted “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest). Residents said they later left the town.

In recent months the insurgents have seized towns from local administrations that often amount to little more than militias, only to give them up and melt away — or be routed by Ethiopian Woyanne or Somali government forces who arrive later.

As the rebels step up their attacks, a spokesman for Burundian troops serving with the AU peacekeeping force in Mogadishu said one of their soldiers was killed on Tuesday by a suicide bomber who rammed a car into the gates of an AU base.

Witness Fahom Mohammed said four civilians also died.

“A refugee woman and her three children were cut to pieces by the blast while they were queuing outside the Burundian compound waiting for water,” she told Reuters.

Elsewhere in Somalia’s rubble-strewn capital, at least two Ethiopian Woyannen troops were wounded on Wednesday when a remote controlled roadside bomb tore through their convoy.

“I saw two Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers bleeding heavily and lying in the road,” said local man Ahmed Shine. “The Ethiopians Woyannes blocked off the whole area where the incident happened.”

(Writing by Daniel Wallis)