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By Guled Mohamed and Sophie Walker

MOGADISHU/LONDON, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf said on Thursday he would hold a national reconciliation conference soon that would be open to all clans in the country, still racked by violence after a December war.

Mortar bombs were targeted at Mogadishu's international airport on Thursday and two government soldiers were killed in clashes with gunmen, in the latest attacks in and round the increasingly violent capital.

Somalia's transitional government, backed by Ethiopian warplanes, tanks and troops, drove an Islamist movement out of Mogadishu in late December, ending its six-month rule of the capital and much of the south under strict sharia law.

"We are intending to start this (national reconciliation) congress within two, three weeks," Yusuf told Reuters in an interview during a visit to London.

"We will start at national level and go down to local and regional levels ... down to grassroots. Our people fought hard, we slaughtered each other ... We have to discuss how to forget and forgive."

The Islamists who survived scattered back to their clan areas in the Horn of Africa nation and have vowed to fight an insurgency against the government and a planned 8,000-strong African Union (AU) peacekeeping force.

U.S. officials have accused the Islamists of harbouring al Qaeda members.

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Threats to the government also come from criminal gangs and warlords who hope to regain turf lost when the Islamists took control of Mogadishu in June. Somalia plunged into 16 years of anarchy after dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted in 1991.

Experts say there is little chance of the violence abating until the government reaches out to clans who feel excluded from the political process. Western diplomats have been pressing Yusuf to convene a reconciliation conference.

Yusuf said disarmament was progressing in Mogadishu, where Ethiopian soldiers are helping the government to hold the capital amid almost daily mortar attacks and gunbattles.

"Up til now it is voluntary. We have completely disarmed former warlords and we will continue to disarm the population, on a voluntary basis for the time being. But if (people) won't disarm voluntarily we will do (it) by other means," he said.

Yusuf said Ethiopian troops would withdraw when AU peacekeepers arrived and that he was confident the government could control Mogadishu without the help of its neighbour.

Ugandan, Burundian and Nigerian troops are due to deploy in Somalia as part of the AU force. The U.N. Security Council this week authorised the AU mission for six months.

The two government soldiers who were killed were involved in a gunbattle with local clan militiamen in Laanta Bur near Mogadishu, resident Ismail Yusuf said by telephone. The government had no immediate comment.

Three mortar bombs hit the runway and a car park at Mogadishu's international airport, witnesses said. No one was wounded.

"People ran for cover immediately after the mortar hit the runway. I was standing near the tower during the attack," said one airport worker, who declined to be named.

Gunmen also shot dead a district commissioner in Mogadishu late on Wednesday.

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